Abstract

VEGA, Verónica Corina. Assessment of a Sexual Behavior Questionnaire for female adolescent: The CCS. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2006, vol.23, n.1, pp.47-79. ISSN 1668-7027.

Cultural access makes adolescence a phase immersed in a psychosocial process that varies with time. From generation to generation, adolescents change their manifestations and thus, to understand the adolescent phenomena, it is necessary to look into the social context where it develops. If sexuality is considered a cultural product, which has been modified in the last decades, and adolescence is a developmental phase in which culture has a profound impact and in addition there is little systematized information about sexual activity in Argentine adolescents, then, an instrument that assesses sexual behaviors of female adolescents is needed. The purpose of this research was to construct an Inventory for the Assessment of Sexuality in female adolescents. Thus, we made a list of 50 theoretical items based on Freud (1905) and Kernberg's (1995) theories as well as on Dio Bleichmar's (1997) theory about female sexuality. The CCS or SBQ (Cuestionario de Conducta Sexual or Sexual Behavior Questionnaire) consists of three clearly identified sections: Section 1: General information, Section 2: Specific information, and Section 3: The questionnaire itself. The first section is for obtaining general information such as age, religion, school level, sexual orientation, who she lives with, kind of sexual activity that she has, etc. The second section is destined only for those who have already begun their genital development, and if the adolescent has not yet startedthis phase, then she must go over to the third part of the questionnaire. The third section named The questionnaire, is a list of 33 items divided into five answer categories within a Likert scale framework (1: never, and 5: always). These 33 items are classified into three factors with 11 items each: (1) Integrated female sexuality, (2) Fantasy and disintegrated sexual activities and (3) Sexual pathological aspects. The sample used to test the list of the first 50 theoretical items was made up of 149 girls of ages 13 to 23 (M = 17.29, SD = 2.71) all students of public high schools of Avellaneda District, Buenos Aires (Argentina). After a satisfactory proof of sample adequacy had been obtained (KMO = .875), the results were factor analyzed through the PCA method with Oblimin rotation. We were able to identify three factors: the first had 24 items, the second 15 items, and the third factor 11 items. In order to have the same number of items (11) in each factor, we chose the items which best scored in each factor. Finally 33 items were selected for the Sexual Behavior Questionnaire. To control for satisfactory reliability of the construct and for each factor we applied an alpha for the total amount of 33 items (α = .8497). Then, the same procedure was applied to each factor and results showed that the first factor presented more reliability (α = .9315) than the others, followed by the second factor (α = .6661) and then the third one (α = .5757), which showed low reliability. Hence, alpha is low where pathological aspects are evaluated. We hypothesized that this was due to three characteristics of the sample: schooled, non clinical and adolescent. For studying theoretical concordance between results and others variables of the instrument, we took: (1) type of sexual activity, (2) genital development and (3) age at the beginning of genital development. We crossed each of them with chronological age. An empirical confirmation existed between the theory of the instrument and the construction made. We recommend applying the same procedure to a non clinical and clinical sample of female adolescents in order to refute or confirm hypotheses about factors.

Keywords : Questionnaire; Female; Adolescents; Sexuality.

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