An analysis of the rate at which NCAA athletes were found responsible in campus disciplinary proceedings for sexual offenses at 34 Division I public universities since 2014.
Summary
This methodology underlies the data analysis for part three of the USA TODAY Network's investigation, Predator Pipeline, found here: https://gatehousenews.com/predatorpipeline/athletes-overrepresented-in-sex-cases/
The files include 1) an Excel spreadsheet containing raw data compiled from 34 universities that provided records of school disciplinary proceedings since 2014 in which a student was found responsible for committing a sexual offense, including whether the student played an NCAA sport and, if so, which sport; 2) five Excel spreadsheets containing data downloaded from the U.S. Department of Education website (https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/) showing the numbers of students and athletes at each institution each school year from 2013-14 through 2017-18; and 3) a Jupyter notebook containing the calculations.
To conduct the analysis, we first identified which of the students found responsible by their universities for sexual offenses were NCAA athletes. We took that proportion and compared it to the proportion of students at those schools who were athletes (drawn from the Department of Education data). We ran the same analysis for students who played football and students who did not play football. We concluded that at these schools over this time period, NCAA athletes were disciplined for sexual offenses at more than three times the rate of nonathletes and football players at more than eight times the rate of students who did not play football.
The full methodology can be accessed here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6573560-Predator-Pipeline-Data-Analysis-Methodology.html