Sexual wellbeing questions

• Populations: General population
• Age ranges: 14-19
• Languages: English
• Countries: United Kingdom

Items

Response options: Strongly agree; agree; neither agree nor disagree; disagree; strongly disagree

I know as much as I need to about sex right now

I feel confident I could get sexual health support (e.g. condoms, contraception, testing for sexually transmitted infections) if I needed it.

I have someone that I can talk with openly about sex and relationships.

People close to me accept who I am attracted to (e.g. boys, girls, both, no one).

If I were to have a bad sexual experience, I have someone I can talk to.

Thinking about sex makes me feel ashamed.

The idea of having sex makes me feel anxious.

Some of the things I’ve heard about sex make me feel anxious.

I feel left out when people talk about sex.

I’m anxious that someone might try to touch me in sexual ways I don’t want.

I worry that someone I am intimate with might not listen to what I like and dislike when kissing, cuddling or having sex.

I feel pressure to do things sexually that I don’t want to.

I would find it easy to say if I did not want to do something like kissing, cuddling or sex.

I worry about being bad at sex.

I worry I won’t know what to do during sex.

Most days I feel attractive.

Most days I feel happy with the way I look.

I feel insecure about my genitals (penis, vagina, vulva etc.).

I feel anxious about what others will think of my naked body.

I feel comfortable with who I am attracted to (e.g. boys, girls, both, no one).

I worry that people would judge me if they knew my sexual thoughts and feelings.

I worry that if someone asked me out, they would only want sex.

Scoring

Suggested scoring for each item: 0-4

This is a list of questions, not a measure, and is not designed to be scored as a set.

Team comments

These 22 items were developed via focus group and cognitive testing with adolescents aged between 14 and 19. They represent a ‘long list’ of items tested via an online survey (n=1712) as part of work to develop a brief psychometric measure of adolescent sexual wellbeing.  The final measure [NAME TO BE CONFIRMED] was designed as part of the Good Measure project and includes 13 of these items. This measure is listed separately.

We provide the long-list here as survey researchers sometimes seek single or paired items rather than a full measure. All these items had good distribution of responses across the answer categories (adjacent categories all >5%). The chronbach alpha across the full set is 0.87, suggesting that together they all contribute information to an underlying latent construct of sexual wellbeing.