The Societal Response Index: Measuring Public Response to Sexual Misconduct Disclosure

Rodríguez-Planas, Núria ()
Additional contact information
Rodríguez-Planas, Núria: Queens College, CUNY

No 18775, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: How societies respond after women disclose sexual misconduct shapes survivors' well-being, reporting behavior, institutional accountability, and social norms. Yet, no validated measure of society's collective public response following disclosure exists. This paper introduces the Societal Response Index (SRI), a pre-registered, multidimensional framework with 5 complementary dimensions — volume & persistence (VP), secondary victimization, identity exposure, supportive/contested response, and temporal reactivation — and develops and validates its first dimension, VP. Using census-level tweet counts from the X full-archive API, I construct weekly attention series for 14 sexual misconduct cases spanning Spain, the US, and France (2011--2026). VP's three highest-attention weeks fall within two weeks of a pre-registered milestone for all 14 cases; same-day detection reaches 75% and within-14-day detection reaches 91%. VP correlates positively and significantly with Google Trends for all cases. The measurement architecture, keyword dictionaries, and event timelines will be released as a public good upon publication. As an illustration of substantive reach, official reporting of sexual offenses tends to rise following case milestones.

Keywords: societal response; public attention; index construction; text as data; sexual misconduct; gender violence; pre-registration; Spain; United States; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 C55 J16 K14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18775.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18775

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().