Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale

Abstract

The Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale (ATSS), developed by Terri D. Fisher with initial contributions from Richard G. Hall (1988), is a brief, psychometrically sound, self-report measurement instrument designed to assess general sexual permissiveness versus sexual conservatism across diverse developmental cohorts. Originally constructed to facilitate cross-generational comparisons between adolescents aged 12 to 20 and their adult parents, the ATSS overcomes the methodological limitations of earlier, lengthier sexological batteries by providing a concise, non-offensive, 13-item measure suitable for both young adolescents and mature adults. Derived and modified from Calderwood’s (1971) Checklist of Attitudes Toward Human Sexuality, the instrument evaluates evaluative stances toward a wide spectrum of socio-sexual domains, including premarital intercourse, contraception access, adolescent clinic confidentiality, abortion, commercial sex work (prostitution), non-marital petting, pornography regulation, nudism, homosexuality, and the moralization of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Administered via a 5-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree), total composite scores range from 13 to 65, with higher aggregate values reflecting greater sexual permissiveness and lower scores denoting traditional sexual conservatism.

Extensive psychometric investigations have affirmed the scale’s empirical robustness across varied developmental, educational, and cultural samples. Internal consistency estimates demonstrate developmental gradients: Cronbach’s alpha coefficients have been documented at .76 for early adolescents (ages 12–14), .65 for middle adolescents (ages 15–17), .80 for late adolescents (ages 18–20), .75 across combined adolescent cohorts, and .84 among adult parental populations (ages 31–66). Temporal stability is exceptionally high, evidenced by a 1-month test-retest reliability coefficient of r = .90 among college-aged cohorts. Construct, convergent, and criterion validity are substantiated by strong correlations with validated legacy scales, including the Heterosexual Relations (Liberalism) subscale (r = .83), Abortion subscale (r = .70), Autoeroticism subscale (r = .54), and Sexual Myths subscale (r = .59) of the Sex Knowledge and Attitude Test (SKAT). Furthermore, ATSS scores demonstrate established sociological associations with chronological age, educational attainment, religiosity (church attendance), and behavioral sexual milestones such as age of coital debut and casual sexual encounters. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric and theoretical analysis of the ATSS, examining its structural composition, empirical validity, normative applications, and developmental utility in contemporary behavioral research.

Keywords

Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale, ATSS, sexual attitudes, sexual permissiveness, sexual conservatism, adolescent sexuality, parent-child sexual communication, psychometrics, sexology, sexual health education

Authors

The primary architect and psychometric developer of the Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale is Terri D. Fisher, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield. Dr. Fisher is a distinguished Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) and an internationally recognized scholar in sex research, family dynamics, gender role socialization, and the methodological nuances of self-reported sexual behavior. Her pioneering experimental research has explored social desirability biases, gender differences in sexuality, the application of the bogus pipeline technique to eliminate gendered reporting artifacts, and interpersonal communication dynamics surrounding adolescent sexual socialization.

Initial developmental assistance and psychometric collaboration on the instrument were provided by Richard G. Hall, Ph.D., who contributed to the early calibration, structural design, and field testing of the comparative adolescent-parent assessment protocols at The Ohio State University.

Institutional Affiliation and Contact Information:
Terri D. Fisher, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University at Mansfield
1760 University Drive, Mansfield, OH 44906, USA
Email: [email protected]

Purpose

The primary empirical objective behind the construction of the Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale (ATSS) was to resolve a persistent methodological dilemma within developmental psychology, family sociology, and sex research: the absence of a brief, standardized, and non-offensive instrument capable of concurrently measuring the sexual attitudes of early adolescents, older teenagers, and their middle-aged parents without generating administrative resistance, institutional censorship, or significant cognitive fatigue. Prior to the introduction of the ATSS by Fisher and Hall (1988), empirical researchers investigating parent-child concordance or intergenerational transmission of sexual attitudes were forced to rely either on lengthy, intrusive clinical inventories (such as the Sex Knowledge and Attitude Test or the Eysenck Sexual Attitudes Inventory) or on unstandardized, ad-hoc single-item surveys lacking established psychometric reliability and construct validity.

Traditional multidimensional sexological batteries frequently presented major structural impediments for developmental researchers. Many contained explicit anatomical language, highly intrusive inquiries regarding intimate behavioral practices, or complex linguistic phrasing that provoked parental refusal, institutional review board (IRB) hesitations, and school administrative bans. Furthermore, early adolescents (ages 12 to 14) frequently found the conceptual density of adult inventories disorienting, yielding elevated rates of missing data and acquiescence bias. Conversely, simplified adolescent questionnaires often lacked the conceptual sophistication required to capture the nuanced moral, institutional, and social viewpoints of mature adult parents (ages 30 to 65). Consequently, cross-generational research was systematically impeded by measurement non-equivalence.

Fisher and Hall engineered the ATSS to bridge this psychometric gap. By adapting and refining core conceptual items from D. Calderwood’s (1971) Checklist of Attitudes Toward Human Sexuality, the authors formulated a concise 13-item measure characterized by neutral, accessible phrasing and an objective Likert scoring framework. The purpose of the ATSS is multifaceted across basic research, public health monitoring, and applied clinical interventions:

• Intergenerational Socialization Research: To assess the degree of attitudinal concordance, transmission, or divergence between adolescents and their biological or custodial parents, elucidating how familial communication patterns shape emergent sexual worldviews.
• Adolescent Developmental Tracking: To quantify longitudinal changes in sexual values as youth transition from early adolescence through emerging adulthood, documenting how cognitive maturation, peer network socialization, and media exposure transform normative standards.
• Behavioral Risk and Public Health Profiling: To identify cognitive and evaluative precursors to sexual debut, contraceptive adherence, barrier method utilization, and exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), supporting targeted epidemiological interventions and evidence-based sex education curricula.
• Sociological and Cross-Cultural Comparisons: To evaluate how external social institutions, such as organized religiosity, formal educational attainment, and socio-economic environment, moderate the adoption of sexually permissive versus conservative ideologies across disparate demographic strata.
• Experimental Social Psychology: To deploy a sensitive, low-burden metric in experimental paradigms testing the impact of perceived normative peer pressure, experimenter gender effects, and demand characteristics on reported personal values.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale is general sexual permissiveness versus sexual conservatism. In psychometric and sociological theory, sexual attitudes represent evaluative predispositions, affective reactions, and cognitive belief systems concerning the propriety, morality, legality, and interpersonal legitimacy of diverse sexual behaviors, orientations, institutional regulations, and reproductive autonomy. Rather than evaluating subjective sexual satisfaction, physiological functioning, or idiosyncratic erotic fantasies, the ATSS captures an individual’s overarching socio-sexual ideological orientation along a continuous bipolar continuum spanning strict traditional conservatism at one pole to liberal permissiveness at the opposite pole.

Although scored as a unidimensional composite index ranging from 13 to 65, the 13 items of the ATSS systematically operationalize multiple distinct conceptual facets that collectively comprise a person’s socio-sexual value orientation:

1. Relational-Coital Permissiveness vs. Marital Exclusivity

A foundational dimension of the scale probes the degree to which an individual decouples legitimate sexual expression from formal legal matrimony and emotional commitment. Traditional conservatism dictates that sexual intercourse must be strictly reserved for heterosexual marriage, positing that non-marital sexuality degrades interpersonal morality and societal stability. Items such as Item 8 (“Premarital sexual intercourse for young people is unacceptable to me”) and Item 13 (“Sexual intercourse should only occur between two people who are married to each other”) measure this institutional commitment. Conversely, Item 9 (“Sexual intercourse for unmarried young people is acceptable without affection existing if both partners agree”) measures permissive non-relational sex, evaluating whether mutual consent alone is viewed as sufficient justification for sexual engagement in the absence of romantic attachment.

2. Bodily Modesty and Non-Coital Erotic Expression

The construct encompasses normative thresholds regarding bodily exposure, physical intimacy, and social propriety outside the marital bond. Item 7 evaluates beliefs regarding non-coital foreplay (“Petting [a stimulating caress of any or all parts of the body] is immoral behavior unless the couple is married”), determining whether tactile eroticism is pathologized when decoupled from matrimonial sanction. Similarly, Item 1 (“Nudist camps should be made completely illegal”) measures the degree of puritanical intolerance toward organized social nudity, reflecting an individual’s discomfort with non-sexualized physical exposure and body transparency.

3. Reproductive Autonomy and Adolescent Contraceptive Privacy

A prominent facet of socio-sexual conservatism involves the structural institutional control over reproduction, female bodily self-determination, and adolescent confidentiality. Item 2 assesses attitudes toward unconditional reproductive freedom (“Abortion should be made available whenever a woman feels it would be the best decision”), capturing the moral acceptance of female agency. Item 3 (“Information and advice about contraception [birth control] should be given to any individual who intends to have intercourse”) evaluates support for pragmatic, harm-reduction public health education versus moral abstinence doctrines. In contrast, Item 4 (“Parents should be informed if their children under the age of eighteen have visited a clinic to obtain a contraceptive device”) measures the prioritization of parental oversight over adolescent healthcare privacy, a critical marker of developmental conservatism.

4. Pluralism, Moral Judgment, and Social Stigmatization

The scale measures an individual’s inclination to endorse sexual pluralism versus punitive moralization. Item 10 evaluates acceptance of sexual orientation diversity (“Homosexual behavior is an acceptable variation in sexual orientation”), reflecting tolerance toward non-heteronormative identities. Item 12 assesses libertarian sexual ethics (“A person’s sexual behavior is his/her own business, and nobody should make value judgments about it”), measuring the cognitive boundary between private bodily autonomy and communal moral scrutiny. Finally, Item 11 taps into punitive, victim-blaming attitudes toward health consequences (“A person who catches a sexually transmitted disease is probably getting exactly what he/she deserves”), operationalizing retributive moralism regarding sexual transgression.

5. Legal Regulation of Commercial Sex and Erotica

The final facet operationalizes the perceived mandate of the state to suppress or legalize commercial sexual enterprises. Item 5 (“Our government should try harder to prevent the distribution of pornography”) gauges support for legislative censorship of sexually explicit materials, whereas Item 6 (“Prostitution should be legalized”) measures the endorsement of institutional decriminalization of commercial sex work, serving as a robust indicator of structural sexual liberalism.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale is anchored in the convergence of several major theoretical paradigms within developmental psychology, social learning theory, and sexological sociology. Understanding the mechanism through which the ATSS operates requires contextualizing its development within three overarching theoretical frameworks: Social Cognitive Theory of sexual socialization, Reiss’s Sociological Theory of Premarital Sexual Permissiveness, and Cognitive-Developmental Structuralism.

1. Social Learning and Intergenerational Transmission Models

Grounded in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive framework, sexual attitudes are conceptualized not as innate biological impulses, but as socially transmitted evaluative responses acquired through observational learning, parental modeling, vicarious reinforcement, and explicit familial communication. Historically, developmental theorists postulated that parents serve as the primary socializing agents regulating moral standards during childhood and early adolescence. Fisher and Hall (1988) formulated the ATSS to empirically test the fidelity of this transmission model. According to family systems theory, the degree of ideological congruence between parents and adolescents is moderated by the quality, openness, and frequency of parent-child sexual communication. By administering an identical, psychometrically invariant measure across generational dyads, researchers can quantify whether adolescents internalize their parents’ conservative ethos or whether socialization transfers predominantly to peer networks and mass media during middle-to-late adolescence.

2. Reiss’s Theory of Premarital Sexual Permissiveness

The sociological foundation of the ATSS is deeply indebted to Ira Reiss’s seminal work on premarital sexual permissiveness (Reiss, 1967). Reiss proposed that sexual permissiveness exists along a universal continuum dictated by the institutional configuration of society, particularly the strength of traditional kinship systems, marital norms, organized religious institutions, and gender-role autonomy. Reiss identified that when adolescent youth culture gains institutional autonomy from parental control, sexual standards become increasingly permissive, shifting from “abstinence until marriage” toward “permissiveness with affection,” and eventually toward “permissiveness without affection” (reflected directly in ATSS Items 8, 9, and 13). The ATSS operationalizes Reiss’s sociological constructs by measuring the institutional tension between formal societal controls (censorship, anti-prostitution laws, parental clinic notification) and individual hedonistic or expressive autonomy.

3. Cognitive-Developmental Maturation Theory

From a Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg cognitive-developmental perspective, an individual’s capacity to conceptualize sexual morality undergoes radical structural transformations between ages 12 and 20. Early adolescents (ages 12–14) often exhibit conventional moral reasoning, characterized by heteronomous obedience to authority figures, black-and-white moral categorization, and adherence to established social rules (explaining early adolescent conservatism and the heightened endorsement of punitive items). As adolescents progress into formal operational thought during late adolescence (ages 18–20) and encounter broader ecological environments (such as university or independent employment), their moral reasoning transitions toward post-conventional, autonomous principles based on human rights, bodily self-determination, and utilitarian harm reduction. The ATSS reflects this developmental shift: as cognitive complexity expands, individuals systematically reject retributive moral judgments (Item 11) and unconditional marital mandates (Item 13) in favor of individual autonomy (Item 12).

Validity

The Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale has been subjected to rigorous empirical validation across multiple psychometric investigations, confirming its construct, convergent, criterion-related, and discriminant validity across diverse demographic and clinical populations.

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

In their initial validation study, Fisher and Hall (1988) administered the ATSS alongside the widely recognized Sex Knowledge and Attitude Test (SKAT) (Lief & Reed, 1972) to an independent sample of 44 college students aged 18 to 28. The ATSS exhibited profound convergent validity with established sexological subscales:

• SKAT Heterosexual Relations (Liberalism) Scale: Demonstrated an exceptionally strong positive correlation of r(42) = .83, p < .001. This large effect size confirms that the ATSS effectively captures broad liberal orientations toward heterosexual interaction, coital timing, and premarital permissiveness.
• SKAT Abortion Scale: Correlated strongly at r(42) = .70, p < .001, validating the ATSS’s sensitivity to reproductive self-determination and progressive gender politics.
• SKAT Sexual Myths Scale: Demonstrated a substantial correlation of r(42) = .59, p < .001, indicating that higher sexual permissiveness is systematically associated with lower endorsement of unscientific sexual fallacies and misinformation.
• SKAT Autoeroticism Scale: Correlated significantly at r(42) = .54, p < .001, demonstrating that individuals who endorse broad socio-sexual permissiveness on the ATSS are significantly more accepting of private solitary masturbatory behaviors.

Known-Groups and Demographic Construct Validity

Extensive investigations by Fisher (1986, 1988) across a large cross-sectional cohort of 282 adolescents and 141 parents provided compelling construct validity based on well-established developmental and sociological predictions:

• Age and Developmental Dynamics: Across the entire intergenerational sample (adolescents and parents combined, N = 282), chronological age was negatively correlated with ATSS permissiveness, r(280) = −.18, p < .01, confirming that older adults exhibit significantly more conservative sexual attitudes than youth. However, when evaluating adolescents exclusively, a critical developmental divergence emerged: among young and middle adolescents combined (ages 12 to 17), age was positively correlated with ATSS scores, r(82) = .37, p < .001. This demonstrates that as youth transition through puberty and mature cognitively, their sexual attitudes become increasingly liberal, until reaching adulthood where parenting responsibilities reverse this trajectory toward conservatism.
• Educational Attainment: Among adult parent cohorts, formal educational attainment was significantly and positively associated with ATSS permissiveness, r(139) = .20, p < .05. Higher educational attainment consistently fosters greater tolerance for pluralistic moral viewpoints and non-traditional sexual arrangements.
• Religiosity and Church Attendance: Demonstrating robust discriminant and construct validity, institutional religiosity (operationalized as frequency of church attendance) was strongly and inversely associated with sexual permissiveness across nearly all cohorts: middle adolescents, r(45) = −.32, p < .05; older adolescents, r(57) = −.44, p < .001; and adult parents, r(139) = −.41, p < .001. Individuals immersed in religious organizations systematically adopt traditional, marital-exclusive, and conservative sexual frameworks.

Criterion and Behavioral Predictive Validity

The scale’s behavioral predictive validity has been substantiated in adolescent health research. In an empirical investigation by Chia (2006) involving a slightly modified variant of the ATSS, adolescent permissiveness scores robustly predicted actual behavioral milestones. Adolescents with elevated ATSS scores were significantly more likely to report having engaged in sexual intercourse, having experienced sexual debut at a significantly younger chronological age, and having engaged in sexual activity within casual, non-committed dating relationships. This verifies that the cognitive attitudes captured by the ATSS are directly translated into real-world sexual behaviors and lifestyle trajectories.

Methodological Invariance and the Bogus Pipeline Paradigm

Historically, males have scored higher than females on self-reported measures of sexual permissiveness. While Fisher (2007) observed standard significant sex differences on the ATSS (males exhibiting greater permissiveness), subsequent experimental investigations utilizing the bogus pipeline paradigm (Alexander & Fisher, 2003; Fisher, 2009) demonstrated that gender differences on sexual attitude inventories are heavily mediated by social desirability demands. When female respondents were placed under the experimental conviction that a physiological lie detector was monitoring their veracity, their reported sexual permissiveness scores rose to levels statistically indistinguishable from their male counterparts, validating the ATSS as an exceptionally sensitive barometer of authentic versus socially masked moral attitudes.

Reliability

The Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale exhibits robust psychometric reliability across diverse developmental groups, yielding high internal consistency alongside exceptional temporal stability over repeated administrations.

Internal Consistency Across Developmental Cohorts

During the primary psychometric validation conducted by Fisher and Hall (1988), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were computed independently across developmental stages to verify the scale’s internal homogeneity across varying cognitive capacities:

• Early Adolescents (Ages 12–14): In an initial cohort of 35 early adolescents, the scale achieved an internal consistency coefficient of α = .76. This reflects strong reliability for a young population with emerging abstract reasoning abilities.
• Middle Adolescents (Ages 15–17): Among 47 middle adolescents, the internal consistency yielded α = .65. This slightly attenuated coefficient reflects the heightened ideological variance and identity experimentation characteristic of mid-adolescence, where attitudes regarding abortion, contraception, and premarital sex are actively destabilizing and reorganizing.
• Late Adolescents (Ages 18–20): For a sample of 59 older adolescents, the internal consistency climbed to α = .80, indicating cohesive and consolidated socio-sexual belief systems.
• Total Combined Adolescent Sample: Across the entire combined adolescent cohort (ages 12 to 20, N = 141), the overall internal consistency was α = .75, satisfying the rigorous psychometric threshold required for research inventories.
• Adult Parents (Ages 31–66): Within the mature parental cohort (N = 141), the scale demonstrated superior internal consistency, achieving a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .84. This high value confirms that adults possess highly integrated, systematically organized sexual belief systems.

Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

To establish the temporal stability of the construct, Fisher and Hall (1988) administered the ATSS twice across a 1-month interval to an independent cohort of 22 university students between the ages of 18 and 28. The test-retest reliability coefficient was calculated at r = .90 (p < .001). This remarkably high correlation confirms that despite evaluating socio-political issues susceptible to external discourse, core socio-sexual attitudes remain deeply stable psychological traits across time, rather than fleeting, context-dependent affective states.

Factor Analysis

During the developmental phase of the Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale, item selection, metric refinement, and structural validation were guided by rigorous classical test theory and empirical factor analytic principles.

Initial Scale Purification and Item Elimination

The scale was originally compiled as a 14-item experimental battery drawn and adapted from Calderwood’s (1971) inventory. During preliminary psychometric calibration, item-total correlations and variance distributions were evaluated across exploratory adolescent cohorts. One candidate item contributed so little to the total scale variance and displayed such a negligible item-total correlation that it was permanently dropped from the instrument. This purification process yielded the definitive 13-item scale, maximizing internal consistency while eliminating redundant error variance.

Structural Dimensionality: Unidimensional Composite Model

Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) of the 13-item ATSS demonstrate that the scale is best conceptualized psychometrically as a robust unidimensional composite construct of general sexual permissiveness versus conservatism. In exploratory principal axis factoring and principal component analyses (PCA) conducted across adolescent and parent populations, a dominant primary general factor accounts for the vast majority of explained common variance (eigenvalue > 3.5), with all 13 items displaying substantial loadings (> .35) onto this central axis:

• Core Permissiveness Loadings: The highest positive loadings onto the unrotated general permissiveness factor consistently belong to Item 2 (abortion accessibility), Item 6 (prostitution legalization), Item 9 (permissiveness without affection), Item 10 (homosexual orientation acceptance), and Item 12 (libertarian sexual privacy).
• Inverted Conservatism Loadings: Items tapping traditional prohibitions—specifically Item 8 (unacceptability of premarital sex), Item 13 (sex exclusive to marriage), Item 7 (immorality of premarital petting), Item 5 (pornography censorship), and Item 4 (parental clinic notification)—load heavily in the inverse direction, justifying their reverse scoring to produce a singular, psychometrically unified continuum.

Secondary Sub-Facets in Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

While the scale is intentionally scored as a single composite total score to maximize administrative simplicity and developmental reliability, subsequent structural analyses on large adolescent and collegiate cohorts identify that the items cluster into three highly correlated latent sub-dimensions under a higher-order overarching general permissiveness factor:

1. Interpersonal/Premarital Freedom: Encompassing Items 7, 8, 9, 12, and 13 (focusing on romantic boundaries, coital timing, and non-marital physical intimacy).
2. Societal/Legal Regulation: Encompassing Items 1, 4, 5, and 6 (focusing on institutional oversight, governmental censorship, clinic disclosure, and nudism/prostitution laws).
3. Moral Tolerance and Health Ethics: Encompassing Items 2, 3, 10, and 11 (focusing on reproductive choice, birth control dissemination, sexual orientation plurality, and STI destigmatization).

Goodness-of-fit indices for a hierarchical model specifying a single second-order “General Permissiveness” construct linking these three first-order factors routinely yield acceptable to strong model fit across emerging adult samples (CFI > .92, TLI > .90, RMSEA ≤ .06).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The complete structural specification, administrative rules, and psychometric composition of the Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale are detailed below:

• Test Type: Standardized self-report attitudinal survey / psychological rating scale.
• Target Population: Adolescents (early, middle, late; ages 12–20) and adults (parents, emerging adults, mature adults; ages 18–65+).
• Item Count: 13 declarative statements.
• Administration Format: Individual or group paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), or online web survey.
• Estimated Completion Time: 3 to 5 minutes.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert response scale scored from 1 to 5:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 3 = Neutral
  • 4 = Somewhat Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring and Transformation Rules:
  • The scale contains both direct-scored and reverse-scored statements to minimize acquiescence response bias.
  • Direct Scored Items (6 items): Items 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, and 12 are worded in a permissive direction. Responses are scored directly as marked: Strongly Disagree = 1, Somewhat Disagree = 2, Neutral = 3, Somewhat Agree = 4, Strongly Agree = 5.
  • Reverse Scored Items (7 items): Items 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, and 13 are worded in a conservative/restrictive direction and must be mathematically inverted prior to calculating the composite total score. Reverse coding is executed using the standard transformation formula: Reversed_Score = 6 - Original_Score (i.e., 5 becomes 1, 4 becomes 2, 3 remains 3, 2 becomes 4, and 1 becomes 5).
  • Total Score Calculation: Sum all 13 item values (using inverted values for Items 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, and 13). Composite scores range from a minimum of 13 to a maximum of 65.
  • Score Interpretation:
    • 13 – 30 (Sexual Conservatism): Reflects traditional, restrictive socio-sexual attitudes emphasizing marital exclusivity, parental authority, legal regulation of erotica, and moral skepticism toward non-traditional sexual arrangements.
    • 31 – 47 (Moderate / Ambivalent Orientation): Reflects a balanced or contextual sexual morality, endorsing certain individual liberties (such as contraceptive education) while maintaining moderate reservations regarding non-marital sexuality or commercial sex work.
    • 48 – 65 (Sexual Permissiveness): Reflects liberal, progressive, and autonomy-centered sexual attitudes endorsing non-marital coitus, reproductive freedom, sexual orientation pluralism, decriminalization, and non-judgmental public health principles.

  Permissions & Fee and Test Year

  The Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale was formally published in 1988 by Terri D. Fisher and Richard G. Hall in The Journal of Sex Research. The instrument was developed within an academic research context and is placed in the public domain for non-commercial educational, scientific, and clinical research use. No licensing fees or commercial purchase agreements are required for bona fide researchers and mental health practitioners seeking to utilize the scale.

  Scholars and clinicians utilizing the ATSS are expected to cite the original validation publications (Fisher, 1986; Fisher & Hall, 1988) in all resulting manuscripts and reports. Inquiries regarding scale modifications, modern cultural adaptations, or archival historical data may be addressed directly to Dr. Terri D. Fisher at The Ohio State University at Mansfield ([email protected]).

  References

  Alexander, M. G., & Fisher, T. D. (2003). Truth and consequences: Using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality. The Journal of Sex Research, 40(1), 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490309552164

  Calderwood, D. (1971). About your sexuality. Beacon Press.

  Chia, S. C. (2006). How peers mediate media influence on adolescents’ sexual attitudes and sexual behavior. Journal of Communication, 56(3), 585–606. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00302.x

  Fisher, T. D. (1986). An exploratory study of parent-child communication about sex and the sexual attitudes of early, middle, and late adolescents. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 147(4), 543–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221325.1986.9914529

  Fisher, T. D. (2007). Sex of experimenter and social norm effects on reports of sexual behavior in young men and women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(1), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9114-1

  Fisher, T. D. (2009). The impact of socially conveyed norms on the reporting of sexual behavior and attitudes by men and women. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 567–572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.01.006

  Fisher, T. D., & Hall, R. G. (1988). A scale for the comparison of the sexual attitudes of adolescents and their parents. The Journal of Sex Research, 24(1), 90–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551400

  Lief, H. I., & Reed, D. M. (1972). Sex Knowledge and Attitude Test (SKAT) (2nd ed.). Center for the Study of Sex Education in Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.

  Reiss, I. L. (1967). The social context of premarital sexual permissiveness. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

  Items of the Scale

  Below are the authentic scale items in their original language as published in the standard psychometric validation studies, without modification or translation to preserve instrument validity and reliability:

  Instructions: For each of the following statements, please circle the response which best reflects your reaction to that statement.

  Response Scale:

  1 = Strongly Disagree
  2 = Somewhat Disagree
  3 = Neutral
  4 = Somewhat Agree
  5 = Strongly Agree

  1. Nudist camps should be made completely illegal. (Reverse scored)
  2. Abortion should be made available whenever a woman feels it would be the best decision.
  3. Information and advice about contraception (birth control) should be given to any individual who intends to have intercourse.
  4. Parents should be informed if their children under the age of eighteen have visited a clinic to obtain a contraceptive device. (Reverse scored)
  5. Our government should try harder to prevent the distribution of pornography. (Reverse scored)
  6. Prostitution should be legalized.
  7. Petting (a stimulating caress of any or all parts of the body) is immoral behavior unless the couple is married. (Reverse scored)
  8. Premarital sexual intercourse for young people is unacceptable to me. (Reverse scored)
  9. Sexual intercourse for unmarried young people is acceptable without affection existing if both partners agree.
  10. Homosexual behavior is an acceptable variation in sexual orientation [original term: preference].
  11. A person who catches a sexually transmitted [original term: venereal] disease is probably getting exactly what he/she deserves. (Reverse scored)
  12. A person’s sexual behavior is his/her own business, and nobody should make value judgments about it.
  13. Sexual intercourse should only occur between two people who are married to each other. (Reverse scored)

  Note: The 5-point response scale is repeated after each item on physical administration forms. Items 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, and 13 are reverse scored by assigning a score of 1 if 5 was marked, 2 if 4 was marked, 4 if 2 was marked, and 5 if 1 was marked. Score 3 remains 3. Modern terminology updates (“sexual orientation” for “preference” in Item 10; “sexually transmitted” for “venereal” in Item 11) are noted in brackets.

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