School: Mercer Island High School
City: Mercer Island, WA
Grades taught: 9-12 (chemistry)

Principle Investigator: Jeanette Norris, Ph.D.
Department: Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, Project SIS
Institution: University of Washington

Project Description
Over the summer I had the opportunity to work in the lab of Jeanette Norris and Tatiana Masters. Their research involves examining the effects of alcohol consumption on women’s ability to perceive risk cues associated with acquaintance sexual assault and their responses to these assaults. The data for this study is collected via a background computer survey and an experimental session completed by volunteer female research subjects.

The computer survey was used to gather demographic data about the subject, as well as information on topics like her ideas about alcohol, her sexual assault experiences, and her childhood. The experimental session involved a subject either being administered alcohol or placed into a control group (no alcohol). The subject then read a story on the computer about an interaction between a man and a woman where the man makes unwanted sexual advances toward the woman. The female subject is asked to project herself into the story as if she were the woman in the story. Subjects are asked many questions throughout the story to gauge their perception of events, how those events made them feel, and what they would do in the situation described. The majority of data collected in this study is quantitative and will be used for multivariate analyses.

My project in this study was to analyze the small portion of the data that is qualitative. At the end of the story the female subjects read, there is a space for a free-writing response where subjects are asked to describe how the situation in the story will end after the man in the story has made his unwanted sexual advances. I devised a method to code and analyze the responses and then compared the frequency of responses to see if there were any patterns between responses from alcohol subjects and responses from control subjects. I was able to find some trends in the responses that corresponded with the hypotheses from the study. My methods and findings were the first results for the qualitative data, and will most likely be used by the lab as they continue to analyze the responses.

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Dr. Jeanette Norris, Tatiana Masters, and all of the ladies involved in the research at Project SIS. I very much enjoyed my learning experience and look forward to sharing what I have learned with others.