2026 Theses Doctoral

The Perceptions of Consent Educators on Factors Impacting Diffusion of Early Intervention Consent Education

Clayton, Leigh R.

This qualitative study examined why early intervention consent education, despite strong empirical support and widespread stakeholder endorsement, has failed to scale across K–12 educational systems in the United States. Drawing on Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations theory, consent education was conceptualized as a curriculum innovation whose adoption is shaped not only by effectiveness but also by perceived relative advantage, communicability, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability.

Prominent consent educators were identified using scholarly journal databases, written texts, social media presence in consent education spaces, including Instagram and LinkedIn, and involvement in consent education-focused organizations. Recruitment involved emails sent to individuals meeting eligibility criteria, flyers about the study being posted by organizations working in consent education, and snowball sampling. The study reached saturation at 25 participants, and as such, enrollment stopped after 25 interviews.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 prominent consent-education experts involved in the design, dissemination, and implementation of early intervention consent curricula. Transcripts were analyzed using a multiphase coding process that combined in-vivo and attribute-based coding aligned with the six diffusion attributes, followed by barrier–facilitator pattern coding to identify factors influencing adoption and implementation.

Findings indicated that early intervention consent education was widely perceived as having strong relative advantage, observability, and trialability. In contrast, compatibility, complexity, and communicability emerged as primary barriers to diffusion. Sociocultural context significantly shaped these perceptions, and a rapid political shift during the study period further influenced implementation conditions.

These findings suggested that diffusion failures in consent education are driven less by doubts about effectiveness and more by structural, political, and implementation constraints that shape how the innovation is understood, evaluated, and enacted. Implications include the need for greater standardization within the field and for policy frameworks that enhance visibility, legitimacy, and institutional support for early intervention consent education.