Defining Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Replication and Extension

A factorial survey, designed to parallel a study conducted at the University of California (Reilly, Carpenter, Dull, & Bartlett, 1982), was used to assess judgments of the nature of sexual harassment among undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts. The factors determining ratings of harassment proved to be very consistent across student populations and across different judgment tasks. However, there was some indication that the factors that influence defining an incident as sexual harassment are not entirely the same as the determinants of perceived seriousness of an incident.