Catch SHIFT at your local bar

Columbia has a new sexual health and violence initiative on campus, called the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation. Led by professors of public health and psychiatry, SHIFT can be found observing community interactions on campus, in the libraries, or at local bars.

The research generated by SHIFT–including ethnographic studies, interviews, and surveys–will help reform sexual health and violence policies on campus.

This is your campus, so make sure that your voice is heard by getting involved! The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation—known as SHIFT—is a multi-year research project focused on understanding the factors that shape undergrads’ experiences related to sexual health and sexual violence. The research generated by SHIFT will help build evidence-based prevention policies by looking more holistically at the undergraduate experience.

SHIFT is supported by the Office of the President, but is an independent study co-directed by Drs. Jennifer Hirsch and Claude Mellins who are faculty members at Columbia University Medical Center. The project, which has an undergraduate advisory board to ensure that students’ perspectives are part of every element of the study, includes multiple components:

• A year-long ethnographic study of undergraduate student life that looks at a range of student experiences related to socialization, sex, and sexual health. The research team will interview individual students, conduct focus groups, speak with key community and university stakeholders, and do participant observations (you may see them on campus, in the library, or at local bars).
• A novel daily diary study (here, “diary” means taking a short daily web-based survey) that will examine mood, stress, and health behaviors among undergraduate students over 60 days (recruitment starting now! To see if you’re eligible, click here), and a larger one-time survey in the spring that will identify the individual, social, community and institutional factors associated with sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia.
• SHIFT wants the research to make a difference at Columbia, and so a final component involves translating the research into interventions and policies that can prevention sexual violence and promote sexual health. We’re engaged in an ongoing dialogue with administrative stakeholders, faculty, and students to develop recommendations for institutionally-appropriate, evidence-based strategies to reduce sexual violence and make campus a safer, healthier place. The undergraduate advisory board, which has been hard at work with the SHIFT team since late last spring, consists of 20 undergrads from CC, SEAS, GS and Barnard.

You’ll see the research team around campus in the coming weeks recruiting students to participate in interviews or focus groups and to apply to be a part of the daily diary study. Stop by, say hi, and ask questions! All of SHIFT’s opportunities are paid, and student privacy and confidentiality is a top priority. SHIFT researchers are not mandatory reporters, and all data collected will be kept completely anonymous and stored in limited-access encrypted files that only the research team has access to.

Questions? Email us at SHIFT@cumc.columbia.edu. To learn more about SHIFT, visit https://bit.ly/cushift

A hoppin bar scene via Shuttershock