(PS5-A18) Determinants of Victimization Vulnerability: A Qualitative Approach

Adults are increasingly turning to online profiles for dating, networking, and socializing. Unfortunately, some of these online applications are also used by individuals who engage in abusive dating and sexual practices to select potential victims. Therefore, it is important to understand the interplay between someone’s online presence and how predators may evaluate victim vulnerability. Research into determinants of victimization vulnerability has mainly focused on observable characteristics such as gait, accompaniment, and awareness of surroundings, but less is known about covert characteristics like the absence of social support, socioeconomic status, or emotional vulnerability. This may be because prior studies primarily focused on violent victimization, which requires an assessment of immediate overt characteristics that impact whether victimization would be successful. This is contrary to victimization through manipulation and exploitation, which may require attention to a target’s covert characteristics. The current study aims to inform this gap using a novel qualitative approach. 

Three dating profile vignettes were created from 51 women who answered personality questionnaires and created a mock dating profile, and based on previous literature, to represent three separate ads of women with a “high,” an “average,” and a “low likelihood” of victimization, based on scores of conscientiousness, extraversion, negative emotionality, agreeableness, openness to experience, anxious attachment, emophilia, and history of victimization.

The current study analyzes perspectives from 88 men recruited via snowball sampling using emails, social media, and online forums. Participants were asked to share their opinion regarding the level of vulnerability to victimization of three women described in the dating profiles via an anonymous online survey. The male participants were presented with the three distinct female dating profiles (high vulnerability, average vulnerability, low vulnerability) and asked to provide feedback on the profiles based on the following questions: “If a male predator were scrolling through a dating application and saw this woman's dating profile, how would he rate her vulnerability to victimization from 1-10?” and “Provide rationale for why the predator would rate the woman that way.” 

Participant responses will be deidentified such that the team of qualitative raters will be blind to which vignette the response is in reference to. A conventional content analysis approach will be used to generate themes and patterns from the data. Results may help to identify markers that men with a propensity toward sexual and dating victimization may use to first identify women who may be more likely to be victimized due to psychological and or physical phenotypes.