Sexual Behavior Index (Hennessy et al., 2008)

• Populations: Adolescents
• Age ranges: 14-16
• Languages: English
• Countries: United States

Items

• Have you ever participated in deep kissing (some people call this ‘‘French kissing’’)?
• Have you ever done really sexy dancing (some people call this ‘‘bump and grind’’ or ‘‘dirty dancing’’)?
• If you ever have had a female partner, did you touch her breasts? M
• Have you ever had your breasts touched by a partner? F
• Has a partner ever touched your private parts?
• Have you ever put your mouth on a partner’s private parts (some people call this “oral sex”)?
• Has a partner ever put their mouth on your private parts (some people call this “oral sex”)?
• If you ever had a male partner, has he ever put his penis in your anus (some people call this ‘‘anal sex’’)? F
• Have you ever put your penis in your partner’s anus (some people call this ‘‘anal sex’’)? M
• Have you ever had sexual intercourse (i.e., a penis in the vagina) with a partner of the opposite sex?

Items marked M were only presented to male survey respondents.  Items marked F were only presented to female respondents.  Please see notes.

Responses 

Items were dichotomous

Scoring

“We used Mokken scaling to assess the scalability of the dichotomous sexual behavior items. Mokken scaling is a procedure for assessing dichotomous or ordinal response items for unidimensionality. Unidimensionality of the items is defined by the empirical ranking of the items along an unobserved ‘‘difficulty’’ dimension such that all items after the initial failure are also failed and all items before the initial failure are passed (Ringdal et al., 1999). In practice, the marginal proportions of positive responses to the items are used to estimate difficulty (Sijtsma & Verweij, 1992). If the items scale using this definition, then empirical index scores correspond to passing the number of difficulty-ranked items less than or equal to the observed score and failing all difficulty-ranked items greater than the value of the observed score. Item sets are evaluated for unidimensionality using Loevinger’s H coefficient. H for a proposed scale is defined as 1-(Escaleable/Erandom), where Escaleable is the number of observed response errors under the scalability assumptions and Erandom is the number of errors expected under statistical independence given the marginals of the proposed scale items (Ringdal, Jordhøy, & Kaasa, 2003, p 169). As Ringdal et al. (1999, p 27) summarize, ‘‘...H is interpreted as an index for the degree to which subjects can be accurately ordered by means of k items.’’ Mokken (1971, p 185) recommends a minimum value of 0.30 for H (the value can be negative) while values between 0.3 and <0.4 are a weak scale, between 0.4 and <0.5 a medium scale, and 0.5 or more as a strong scale.” 

Citations

Hennessy, M., Bleakley, A., Fishbein, M., & Jordan, A. (2008). Validating an index of adolescent sexual behavior using psychosocial theory and social trait correlates. AIDS and Behavior, 12(2), 321-331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-007-9272-1

Team comments

This measure was developed exclusively for and with Heterosexual participants: researchers are cautioned that items include assumptions relating to gender and sexuality presentation that may not be consistent with all individuals’ lives and values.