School: Kentridge High School
City: Kent, WA
Grades taught: 10-12

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

Project Description
This summer I worked in the lab of Jeanette Norris, Ph.D., and Tatiana Masters, MSW. The lab is currently involved in completing data collection on Project Social Interaction Study (SIS). Project SIS is a series of six experiments designed to explore the relationship between a woman’s alcohol consumption or the expectancy of consuming alcohol and her perception of risk and her emotional and behavioral responses in a sexual assault scenario. The researchers are also interested in exploring how several background variables such as a woman’s previous victimization affect her perceptions and responses.

My research this summer involved two elements. First, I assisted in screening and running subjects in the lab. Second, I was able to analyze data from experiments one through four. In my data analysis I was interested in examining the relationship between a woman belonging to an organized religious group and her rape myth acceptance, alcohol expectancies, risk perception, behavioral responses and psychological barriers in the experimental setting. Basically, I was interested in how the background variable of belonging to a religious group affected the woman. Religion has always fascinated me and I was excited to see how religion could possibly impact a woman in this experiment. Although I was able to find many interesting things, I was not able to probe all of the interactions that I found to be statistically significant. I was also not able to perform analyses based on the woman’s particular religion, for example Catholic versus Buddhist. Further study would be needed not only to probe interactions found in my work, but also to explore the individual religions and their impacts on a woman’s behavior.