Smriti Bajracharya, Adjunct Faculty member and Evaluation Associate, presented the evaluation plan for Washington University’s new Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) Center on Tuesday, December 4. She was the plenary speaker at the fall convening of the Relationship and Sexual Violence Assessment Initiative (RSV-AI), titled Innovations in Evaluation of Relationship & Sexual Violence: Expanding the Boundaries of Privacy and Security.
The RSV-AI, led by Peter Hovmand in the Institute for Public Health, was announced by the university in 2016. The initiative brings together top researchers from the sciences, social work, engineering, law and other disciplines. It aims to develop methods that will form an improved public health assessment system to inform the design and evaluation of prevention programs and policies.
As part of the interdisciplinary team, Bajracharya collaboratively developed an evaluation plan of the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) Center with clear outcomes and tools to measure the success of programs and services on campus. The evaluation seeks to understand:
- access to and inclusivity of RSVP programs and services,
- the extent to which programs and services are trauma-informed,
- the extent to which resources are adequate to achieve program outcomes, and
- the change in knowledge, attitude and behaviors of students who benefit from the RSVP Center’s programming change across their time at the university.
The keynote address at the convening, Using Technology to Expand the Boundaries of Privacy and Security, was delivered by Dr. Joseph A. O’Sullivan, Dean of the UMSL/WashU Joint Undergraduate Engineering Program and Samuel C. Sachs Professor of Electrical Engineering.