posted June 30, 2000 10:22 PM            

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According to Fishbein & Ajzen (1980) attitudes should be specific to the behavior of interest. This should hold true for affectively based sexual attitudes. The Sexual Opinion Survey (SOS) is an empirically derived 21 item scale which was developed to tap the affective dimension of sexuality. However this scale may not be the most appropriate measure of affective responses to premarital sexuality. The underlying dimensions of the SOS are affective reactions to open sexual display, sexual variety and homoeroticism (Fisher, et al, 1988) of which only one is related to affective reactions to premarital sexual activity (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1980; Hendrick & Hendrick, 1987). However, the same socialization agents which produce affective reactions to the behaviors tapped by the SOS may also contribute to the development of affective reactions to premarital sexuality. It is logical to assume that parents who disapprove of sexual intercourse prior to marriage would also disapprove of homosexuality and open sexual display. Conversly, parents who approve of sexual relations with the context of a loving relationship should also be more tolerant of other forms of sexual behavior. This would explain the relationships that have been found between erotophilia-erotophobia and autosexual activity (Fisher, et al 1983) and amount of and diversity of past sexual experience (Fisher, et 1984).

The Reiss Premarital Permissiveness scale (Reiss, 1967) is specific to premarital permissiveness and has been recently revised (Sprecher, McKinney, Walsh & Anderson, 1988; Sprecher, 1989) to reflect the current societal levels of sexual permissiveness. This is a 12 item Guttman scale that assesses beliefs about the acceptability of heavy petting, sexual intercourse, and oral sex for a target individual in a specific dating context. Sprecher has used this scale to examine the effects of target age, gender and relationship status on the acceptability of sexual activity (Sprecher, McKinney, Walsh & Anderson, 1988; Sprecher, 1989). Sprecher found that subjects' acceptability rating for all three types of sexual behavior increased as the target person's relationship increased in its commitment level (Sprecher, McKinney, Walsh & Anderson, 1988). This method of assessing sexuality standards is valid, but not specific enough to allow us to understand how the sexuality standards of an individual affect the sexual behavior of that individual within the context of their current dating relationships.

In 1941, Gordon Allport, suggested that if we want to understand why a person acts in a certain manner, we should ask them. At the intuitive level the rating scale method seems like a valid manner in which to find out what we want to know. Burusch (1984) asserts that rating scales are on the average more valid than questionnaire scales tapping the same construct. Rating scales are also more cost effective in terms of scale development time and also in the time required for subjects to complete the scale. Burusch suggests several practical considerations when using a rating scale. First, in order to control impression management the rating scale should not be used in situations in which answering the scale would have personal consequences for the subject. In most sex research, procedures are used to guarantee anonymity for the participants, so impression management should be no more of a problem than with traditional sexual attitude scales. Second, rating scales work best when the concepts can be expressed in everyday language. A sexuality standard rating scale is amenable to the use of everyday language. A rating scale has another advantage over a traditional permissiveness scale in that with a rating scale, the specific beliefs which underlie a person's group classification are identifiable. The traditional method of using a median split or some three way split based on scale scores does not allow the researcher to specify exactly how the groups should differ other than their position on some global continuum. Such a rating scale could move the study of sexuality standards from the nomoethic questions of how the hypothetical average person perceives the sexuality standards of others and what percent of people find the behaviors acceptable, to the more idiographic and useful question of how do the sexuality standards of an individual relate to their sexual attitudes and behavior.