Development, Reliability, and Validity of the Child Sexual Abuse Myth Scale

Abstract

The Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) Myth Scale was developed to offer a means of reliably measuring acceptance of child sexual abuse myths and stereotypes. Scale items were developed using data from the popular and professional literature on child sexual abuse. The CSA Myth Scale was administered to a sample of 146 men and 259 women drawn from the general population. Three factors emerged from the factor analysis of the total sample, which supported the hypothesis that social attitudes to child sexual abuse constitute a multidimensional construct. The CSA Myth Scale yielded a Cronbach alpha of .764 and a test-retest reliability coefficient of .874. The three CSA Myth Scale factors showed good convergent and discriminant validity, in that factor scores were highly correlated, in expected directions, with scores on Burt's Rape Myth Scale and with scores on the Jackson Incest Blame Scale.