The development of a questionnaire to measure sexual attitudes among sex offenders

Abstract

Sexual attitudes, beliefs and cognitions are currently identified as being an important component in comprehensive treatment approaches of sex offenders. However, there is a lack of questionnaires with established psychometric properties designed to measure such attitudes, beliefs and cognitions. The purpose of the current study was to develop a brief, multi-scale questionnaire to measure sexual attitudes among sex offenders. A 60 item pilot questionnaire was administered to 100 men convicted of child molestation, 50 men convicted of rape against an adult woman and 100 men convicted of non-sexual offences. The results were subjected to factor analyses on the basis of which a 36 item questionnaire was developed. The questionnaire consists of three separate subscales each of which measures attitudes along three different dimensions, namely; sex between adults and children, rape of adult women and general sexual attitudes. Pedophiles were found to respond differently to both the PEDOPHILE and RAPE subscale than the other two offender groups. Each subscale was found to have good reliability and correlations between the subscales were found to be low. Total scores on the questionnaire were found to have some discriminant ability.