Development, Reliability, and Initial Validation of the Fear of Institutional Betrayal Questionnaire

Fear of institutional betrayal is a new conceptual extension of the original institutional betrayal framework. The original framework is a way of making sense of, and giving credibility to, the experiences of harm perpetrated by institutions. The original authors developed a checklist of institutional actions or inactions that harm survivors of sexual violence. Building on this work, fear of institutional betrayal is an attitudinal construct that represents the belief that post-secondary institutions will inevitably fail to prevent or acceptably respond to campus sexual violence, and that engagement with the institution in the aftermath of campus sexual violence will result in harm for survivors. In this paper, two studies provided evidence for the psychometric soundness of the Fear of Institutional Betrayal Questionnaire (FIBQ). The first study established the scale's reliability and unidimensional factor structure. A replication study in a larger, more diverse, national sample of students confirmed these findings. Construct validity was supported across both studies by theoretically consistent correlations and expected group differences across demographic characteristics. These studies demonstrate that the FIBQ is a psychometrically sound instrument that captures a construct not previously assessed in the literature.