Evaluating Campus Safety Messages at 99 Public Universities in 2010

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education published an Action Guide for Emergency Management at Institutions of Higher Education (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). In 2006, the Virginia State Crime Commission issued a prescient “Final Report: Study on Campus Safety (HJR 122)” regarding Virginia’s colleges and universities (Virginia State Crime Commission, 2006). Gray (2009) provided results from a “Columbine 10-Year Anniversary Survey”, which reviewed recent campus safety improvements of 435 K-12 and university respondents. From the three documents, prescribed campus safety activities were identified that could be consistently found in the stated programs and policies on university websites. Of these activities, 18 separate criteria upon which a university’s online emergency preparedness/safety/ security messages could be evaluated through content analysis were conceptualized (coding: 1= school has criterion, 0= does not), to estimate the quality of the overall preparedness message of each institution in the small sample (n = 99) of universities, representing all 50 states in 2010.