Married Women’s Sexual Satisfaction Questionnaire; A Developmental and Psychometric Evaluation

BACKGROUND: Despite the significant contribution of cultural factors to sexual satisfaction, most of the current sexual satisfaction scales pay little attention, if any, to cultural factors and marital status. OBJECTIVES: The current study aimed to develop and validate the Married Women’s Sexual Satisfaction Scale. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The current methodological study went through three consecutive phases. In the first phase, the concept of sexual satisfaction was defined and analyzed by the hybrid model approach. In the second phase, an item pool was generated by the findings of the first phase. Finally, the psychometric properties of the scale were evaluated in the third phase. All data analyses were performed by the SPSS version 19.0. RESULTS: A 78-item pool was generated based on the findings of the concept analysis phase. After assessing and confirming its face and content validity, 27 items remained in the final version of the scale. The exploratory factor analysis revealed a four-factor structure for the scale. The results of the known-groups comparison showed that females with lower educational status had significantly lower sexual satisfaction. Moreover, there was a significant correlation between the scores of the finalized scale and those of the ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Scale (r = 0.706, P = 0.01). The interclass correlation between the test and the retest measurements was also statistically significant (ICC = 0.939, P value = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The 27-item Iranian Married Women’s Sexual Satisfaction Scale is a simple, valid, and reliable tool to assess married women’s sexual satisfaction.