| Abstract: | The purpose of this study was to test the suggestion present in the literature that victims of rape and victims of sexual abuse experience different qualities of self-blame. The specific goal of this research was to compare directly victims of rape and victims of sexual abuse along qualitative dimensions of self-blame, and to do so using a sample drawn from the same general population. A sample of 599 female subjects between the ages of 18 and 25 was obtained across six Southwestern universities. They were asked to answer a questionnaire comprised of a demographic section, the attributional style questionnaire (Peterson et. al., 1982) and self-blame scenarios (Janoff-Bulman, 1979). Subjects were assigned to the one of two experimental groups or the control group depending on whether they indicated they had been victims of rape, victims of sexual abuse, or had not experienced any sexual violations. The Attributional Style Questionnaire (Peterson et al., 1982) and self-blame scenarios developed by Janoff-Bulman (1979) were used to measure subjects' allocation of blame and attributional styles. A factor analysis of the results confirmed previous indications that subjects would manifest different attributional styles for positive and negative events. Three factors were present in the responses to the self-blame scenarios suggesting that subjects differentiated between, and assigned blame differently in, interpersonal events and events testing performance compentencies. No previous factor analyses of the self-blame scenarios have been presented in the literature, so this latter finding constitutes new information. The results of this study indicated that, independent of interaction effects, subjects who were victims of rape, subjects who were victims of sexual abuse, and subjects who had not been sexually violated did not differ significantly in how they manifested self-blame. However, when selected interactions were examined, level of parents' education, family conflict, and family violence appeared to influence the responses of rape subjects, while ethnicity, family cohesion and family stability appeared to impact the responses of sexual abuse subjects. These interactions resulted in some significant response differences between groups. |
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