Development and validity evidence of the multidimensional scale of sexual self-concept in a Spanish-speaking context

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE: STIs and HIV/AIDS are an important public health problem, transmitted by risky sex behaviours. In this context, it is necessary to identify protective factors, of those behaviours, as sexual self-concept. Sexual self-concept is a multidimensional trait (i.e. sexual self-esteem; sexual self-efficacy; and sexual assertiveness), but, in an extensive review, we did not find any measure to assess this multidimensional construct in a Spanish-speaking context. The objective of this research is development a scale to assess sexual self-concept in young people and adults. METHOD: Time-space sampling with a total size of 792 participants, coming from the two Chilean cities (i.e. Arica and Iquique) with the highest HIV rates, aged between 17 and 53 years old (ME = 23.42; SD = 6.33), with 66.2% women (N = 500), 33.6% men (N = 258). RESULTS: Final scale has 16 items and 4 dimensions: sexual self-esteem, sexual self-efficacy, assertive sexual communication, and assertive sexual behaviour. The identified structure provides satisfactory levels of reliability (ω > .8) and presents robust evidence of validity, based on the internal structure of the test, using ESEM (RMSEA = .060; CFI = .99; TLI = .98), evidence of validity based on relationship to other variables (i.e. risky sexual behaviour) and measurement invariance between men and women. CONCLUSIONS: The multidimensional scale of sexual self-concept has adequate psychometric properties to assess sexual self-concept in equivalent samples.