Little is known about college students’ beliefs about the causes of physical violence in dating relationships. In this study two experiments were conducted to address students’ ideas of dating violence and their perceptions of responsibility. The beliefs about the role of power as a contributing cause were of particular interest. The first study was a qualitative study to identify participants’ ways of explaining dating violence. The study used a quantitative approach focusing on students’ ratings of a set of causes in response to a dating scenario. Study participants consisted of 68 female and 39 male undergraduates. Six broad categories of cause emerged: individual, relationship, communication, alcohol, gender socialization, and male power. These categories were most consistent with a 1998 model that addressed distal and proximal levels of causation. The findings suggest that college students understand these different factors (proximal and situational and distal and structural) of causality but fail to see the influence of the distal factors (power and gender socialization) on the proximal factors (communication and alcohol). A major finding was that college students recognized and acknowledged power as a cause of physical abuse in relationships. In summation, the results demonstrate that there are critical curricular decisions to make in the design of dating violence prevention programs. Appendix and references