Sexual assault survivors and cervical smears
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Identifying factors that facilitate sexual assault survivors to attend their cervical smear
IRAS ID
224330
Contact name
Katherine Madden
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Royal Holloway
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 4 months, 1 days
Research summary
Sexual assault describes unwanted sexual abuse/activity which can involve force and lead to distress (APA, 2016). Women who have been sexual assaulted are significantly less likely to attend cervical smears (Farley et al., 2002) and previous research has identified barriers to attendance (Cadman et al., 2012) but not individualistic factors that facilitate attendance. The Health Action Process Approach (HAPA), a health behaviour model, has been applied to explain and predict intention and attendance to a range of health behaviours, including cervical smears in a typical female population (Luszczynska et al., 2011) however has not been applied to look at why women who have been sexually assaulted do or don’t attend their smear. This project aims to use constructs of the HAPA approach to explain what factors facilitate intention and on going attendance of cervical smear tests in women who have been sexually assaulted.
Fourty-four women aged 25-65 years with a range of cervical smears attendance history will be recruited. A questionnaire design will be used to look at whether constructs included in the HAPA model can explain intention or attendance to smear tests, above and beyond other possible variables known to also influence intention or attendance.
Multinomial regression will be used to analyse the amount of variance explained by variables in the HAPA model. This is with the aim of informing interventions to support women who avoid cervical smear attendance.REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/0790
Date of REC Opinion
24 May 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion