Kevin Swartout
Professor Psychology- Education
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011
- Specializations
Social correlates of violence with an emphasis on sexual violence; how alcohol and substance use relate to violent behaviors and experiences with violence; longitudinal data analysis using latent variable and multilevel regression techniques
- Biography
Lab website: Violence Against Women Prevention Lab
Dr. Swartout's current research program can be broken down into three main areas: (1) social influences on individuals’ aggressive attitudes and behaviors; (2) person-centered approaches to analyze longitudinal data on violence and victimization; and (3) exploring the relation between substance use and violence. His first research area began as a conceptual application of the social influence, social networks, and attitudes literatures to the study of violence and aggression. The general goal of this research area is to combine psychological and sociological principles and methods to better situate violence in a social and structural context, with an emphasis on better understanding sexual violence.
Dr. Swartout's second research area stems from his interest in innovative statistical analyses, methodologies, and assessment. Person-centered analyses—such as cluster and latent class analysis and growth mixture models—use co-variation among individuals to cluster them into meaningful groups. This allows researchers the opportunity to detect meaningful subgroups of individuals within their samples. Dr. Swartout has used these methods to model longitudinal data on violence and victimization and has uncovered a number of intriguing patterns. Findings from this line of research have the potential to change the way researchers, practitioners and policy-makers understand how violence and victimization develop and persist across time.
His third research area involves the relation between substance use and sexual violence. Projects in this area have involved longitudinal growth modeling—using both multilevel modeling and structural equation modeling approaches—with time-varying alcohol and drug use as predictors of physical and sexual aggression. Dr. Swartout recently began collecting data for a longitudinal social network project, with the goal of better understanding how sexually-violent behaviors and experiences, drinking behavior, and peer networks co-evolve among college students.
- Publications
(recent selection; * denotes mentored student)
Swartout, K. M., Flack, W. F., Jr., Cook, S. L., Olson, L. N., Smith, P. H., & White, J. W. (2019). Measuring campus sexual misconduct and its context: The Administrator-Researcher Campus Climate Consortium (ARC3) survey. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Advance online publication.
*Borgman, R., *Goodnight, B., & Swartout, K.M. (2019). The Virtual Violence Against Women Scale (VVAWS): A measure of players’ experiences of violence against women in video games. Psychology of Popular Media Culture. Advance online publication.
*Kaczkowski, W. & Swartout, K. M. (2019). Exploring gender differences in sexual and reproductive health literacy among young people from refugee backgrounds. Culture, Health & Sexuality. Advance online publication.
Swartout, K.M. (2018). The Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academia. In. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Report on the Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academic Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Peer reviewed by members of the National Academy of Sciences.
*Brennan, C.L, Swartout, K.M., *Goodnight, B.L., Cook, S.L., Parrott, D.J., Thompson, M.P….Leone, R.M. (2019). Evidence for multiple classes of sexually violent college men. Psychology of Violence, 9(1), 48-55.