Evidence for the validity of the Attitudes Toward Sexual Behaviours Scale (ASBS) with Canadian young people

Abstract

It is important to have psychometrically sound measures of various types of sexual attitudes because sexual attitudes are related to sexual health and sexual behaviour. There are few measures focused on attitudes toward sexual behaviours. In addition, existing measures do not include items that assess online sexual behaviours and/or the context in which sexual behaviours occur. The Spanish Attitudes Toward Sexual Behaviours Scale (ASBS) fills this gap. The goal of the current study was to develop an English version of the ASBS (ASBS-E), and evaluate its psychometric properties in a sample of Canadian young people. A total of 209 participants ranging in age from 18 to 30 years (71.7% female) completed an online survey. The survey included the ASBS-E and measures of religiousity, erotophobia-erotophilia, sexual permissiveness, sexual experience and interest, frequency of use of pornography, and social desirability. The confirmatory factor analysis suggested that the factor structure of the ASBS-E is similar to that of the ASBS – that is, five first-order factors and a unique second-order factor. The results indicated that the ASBS-E has good psychometric properties. Specifically, the reliability estimated by Cronbach's alpha, omega, and split-half method was good. In addition, consistent with predictions, ASBS-E total scores were positively correlated with sexual attitudes and sexual behaviours measures, negatively correlated with measures of religiousity, and unrelated to social desirability, supporting the scale's convergent and discriminant validity. Thus, this scale can be used to to predict contextualized and varied sexual behaviours in clinical and educational contexts.