Survey about sexual harassment contributes to research

“The aim is to gain a better understanding of sexual harassment and gender-based violence in higher education in order to see what it looks like and to obtain stable research data with up to date figures,” says Katrin Mörck, a Project Manager at the Equality Office, who is a member of the working group for the Research and Collaboration Programme for Gender-based Violence in Higher Education.
The survey, which is being implemented with the support of Statistics Sweden, is the only one of its kind and unique in terms of its breadth and scope. It will be sent out to a total of 125,000 people and contains questions concerning whether the respondent has personally been subjected to violence, witnessed this happening to someone else or if they have been the object of or subjected someone else to sexual harassment. Other questions concern gender-based violence and how this relates to health and the psychosocial work environment.

Recipients who choose to answer the questionnaire are asked to return them by midsummer.

“Naturally, we are hoping for a high response rate. To retain anonymity, the data will only be presented in sufficiently large groups to ensure nobody would be able to be identified. The higher the response rate, the more data we can drill down into and gain a solid platform for continued research and analysis.”

An initial research report with the findings of the study  will be published in March next year.  

About the programme

 The initiative for the Research and Collaboration Programme  against sexual harassment and gender-based violence within higher education was taken by KTH, KI and Malmö University in March 2019. The group also includes the National Secretariat for Gender-Research at the University of Gothenburg. The aim was to gain a better understanding of sexual harassment within higher education and in so doing help improve the work and study environment, based on research and experience exchanges in the area .