Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale

Abstract

The Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale (PSPS) is an influential psychometric instrument developed by social psychologist Susan Sprecher and her colleagues (Sprecher et al., 1988; Sprecher, 1989) to evaluate normative attitudes, personal standards, and socio-moral acceptability regarding non-marital sexual behaviors across progressively committed relational stages. Originating as a psychometrically refined, multidimensional modernization of Ira L. Reiss’s pioneering Guttman scales from the 1960s (Reiss, 1964, 1967), the PSPS addresses the developmental and emotional context in which sexual activity occurs. While the comprehensive version assesses three distinct sexual behaviors (heavy petting/genital touching, oral-genital sex, and penile-vaginal sexual intercourse) across five relational milestones (first date, casual dating, serious dating, pre-engagement, and formal engagement), the widely adopted brief form focuses specifically on the five-item hierarchy of sexual intercourse acceptability for the self.

Administered via a 6-point Likert-type response format ranging from Agree Strongly to Disagree Strongly (typically reverse-scored such that higher numerical values signify greater permissiveness), the PSPS demonstrates strong psychometric integrity. Across diverse demographic cohorts—including a benchmark validation sample exceeding 6,000 university students—the instrument has yielded robust internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s α typically ranging from .82 to .91 for the sexual intercourse subscale and exceeding .90 for composite forms). Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses consistently sustain an essentially unidimensional continuum of commitment-conditioned permissiveness, or a robust hierarchical factor structure capturing relational commitment and behavioral intimacy. Construct and convergent validities are evidenced by strong positive correlations with the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI; Simpson & Gangestad, 1991), sensation seeking, sexual sensation seeking, and erotophilia, as well as inverse associations with religiosity and traditional sexual conservatism. Crucially, the PSPS exhibits marked utility in tracking the evolution of the sexual double standard by enabling comparative target modifications (evaluating self vs. generalized male vs. generalized female targets). This article provides a comprehensive overview of the PSPS, delineating its theoretical foundations, structural dimensions, psychometric evidence, administrative procedures, and contemporary empirical applications in relationship science and human sexuality.

Keywords

Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale, PSPS, sexual attitudes, premarital intercourse, sexual double standard, relational commitment, sociosexuality, Susan Sprecher, sexual script theory, psychometrics

Authors

The Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a team of social psychologists and sociologists specializing in interpersonal attraction, close relationships, and human sexuality:

• Susan Sprecher, Ph.D. — Distinguished Professor Emerita of Sociology and Psychology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, United States. (Primary correspondence: [email protected]). Dr. Sprecher is an internationally recognized authority on relationship initiation, social exchange processes, sexuality, close relationship development, and human attraction.
• Kathleen McKinney, Ph.D. — Professor Emerita of Sociology and Cross Endowed Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, United States.
• Robert Walsh, Ph.D. — Sociologist and scholar of family studies and human sexual standards, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, United States.
• Carrie Anderson, M.S. — Researcher in sociological methodology and relational processes, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, United States.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale (PSPS) is to quantitatively operationalize, assess, and differentiate individual and cultural standards regarding the moral and social acceptability of non-marital sexual behavior across varying degrees of interpersonal intimacy and relational commitment. For decades, broad demographic surveys—such as the General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago—relied heavily on single-item global indicators (e.g., asking whether sexual relations between an unmarried man and woman are “always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all”). Although valuable for broad macro-sociological trend analysis, such omnibus items treat premarital sexual permissiveness as a monolithic, decontextualized construct. In reality, human sexual ethics are deeply contextual: individuals rarely hold uniform views about sexual engagement across all social circumstances. Rather, an individual might judge sexual activity as completely unacceptable during casual acquaintance, yet regard it as entirely permissible, normative, and emotionally healthy within an exclusive, committed partnership.

Sprecher, McKinney, Walsh, and Anderson (1988) formulated the PSPS to systematically capture this relational contingency. By situating sexual behaviors along an explicitly calibrated continuum of relational commitment—progressing from a first encounter to formal marital engagement—the instrument enables investigators to dissect the exact threshold where an individual transitions from sexual prohibition to sexual sanction. This granular measurement serves multiple research and applied purposes:

• Investigating the Traditional and Contemporary Sexual Double Standard: By systematically manipulating the nominal target of the scale items—administering parallel forms evaluating standards for oneself, standards for a generic male peer, and standards for a generic female peer—the PSPS offers a rigorous operational tool to measure the persistence, attenuation, or reversal of the traditional sexual double standard (i.e., the historical pattern wherein men are granted greater sexual latitude than women under identical relational conditions; Sprecher, 1989; Crawford & Popp, 2003).
• Elucidating Dyadic Congruence and Relationship Functioning: In clinical, marital, and premarital counseling, discrepancies in partners’ sexual permissiveness thresholds frequently serve as major sources of relational conflict, boundary ambiguity, sexual dissatisfaction, and emotional distress. The PSPS allows clinicians and relationship scientists to map dyadic alignment, pinpoint divergent sexual scripts, and facilitate communication regarding expectations of physical intimacy across stages of relational progression.
• Cross-Cultural and Longitudinal Cohort Tracking: Sociologists and cross-cultural psychologists utilize the PSPS to assess how secularization, modern dating applications, shifting gender roles, and socio-economic changes influence the timing and acceptability of intimacy prior to marriage. The scale provides stable metric properties across distinct historical cohorts, enabling comparative studies of cultural modernization, globalization, and generational shifts in relationship formation.
• Predicting Sexual Health and High-Risk Behaviors: In adolescent and emerging adult health research, attitudes toward casual premarital intercourse are robust predictors of actual behavioral outcomes, including number of sexual partners, concurrent partnerships, adherence to condom use, frequency of alcohol-involved sexual encounters, and exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Disentangling casual permissiveness from committed permissiveness provides far higher predictive precision for sexual risk trajectories than blunt omnibus measures.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the PSPS is premarital sexual permissiveness, conceptualized as an individual’s cognitive endorsement, affective acceptance, and normative evaluation of sexual intimacy occurring outside the institutional boundary of legal marriage, conditioned directly on the depth of the interpersonal bond between the romantic partners. This construct is not treated as an unvarying trait of generalized sexual disinhibition; rather, it represents a sociocognitive schema governed by contextual rules of relational entitlement and interpersonal responsibility.

Within psychometrics and relationship sociology, sexual permissiveness is understood to span two interrelated dimensions: the behavioral intimacy dimension and the relational commitment dimension.

1. The Relational Commitment Continuum

The architectural spine of the PSPS is defined by five distinct, developmentally sequenced stages of interpersonal courtship and commitment:

• First Date (Zero-Commitment / Initial Acquaintance): Captures attitudes toward immediate, spontaneous, or purely recreational sexual engagement in the absence of established trust, relational history, or shared emotional investment. Acceptance at this stage reflects a non-relational or hedonistic sexual standard, wherein physical attraction alone is deemed sufficient justification for sexual intercourse.
• Casually Dating (Dating Less Than One Month / Minimal Commitment): Reflects early-stage exploratory courtship where exclusivity is absent or ambiguous. Endorsement of sexual intercourse at this stage indicates openness to sexual activity during the exploratory phase of dating without requiring emotional attachment or long-term guarantees.
• Seriously Dating (Dating Approximately One Year / Emotional Attachment): Characterized by established emotional intimacy, mutual exclusivity, affection, and interdependence, but without formal institutional or marital pledges. Acceptance here represents the classical “permissiveness with affection” standard (Reiss, 1967), which posits that profound interpersonal love and sustained dyadic commitment legitimize sexual intercourse regardless of legal marital status.
• Pre-Engaged (Explicit Cohabitation or Nuptial Discussions / Anticipatory Commitment): Defined operationally by the partners having seriously discussed the explicit prospect of marriage or shared lifelong union. Permissiveness at this juncture captures the normative transition where sexual exclusivity and intimacy are integrated into mutual future-oriented life planning.
• Engaged (Formal Betrothal / Institutionalized Commitment): Represents formal public commitment to marry. Historically, this served as the earliest transitional boundary where premarital sexual relations were culturally tolerated under a “permissiveness with commitment” doctrine. In contemporary samples, endorsement at this stage approaches universal ceiling effects in secular Western societies, serving psychometrically as the lowest-difficulty threshold on the permissiveness continuum.

2. The Behavioral Intimacy Dimension

In its comprehensive 15-item formulation (Sprecher et al., 1988), the construct is further differentiated across three hierarchical categories of physical and sexual contact:

• Heavy Petting (Genital Touching / Non-Coital Genital Stimulation): Represents erotic stimulation of the genitalia without coitus. Across historical and contemporary samples, this behavior consistently exhibits the lowest barrier to normative acceptance across all relationship stages.
• Sexual Intercourse (Penile-Vaginal Coitus): Represents the traditional cultural and legal benchmark of sexual consummation. The acceptability of intercourse varies dramatically as a function of relationship duration and commitment, displaying the highest variance and psychometric discrimination among emerging adults.
• Oral-Genital Sex (Cunnilingus and Fellatio): Evaluates non-coital oral intimacy. In the initial psychometric evaluations conducted in the late 1980s, oral-genital sex was perceived by college participants as slightly less acceptable—or more emotionally intimate—than sexual intercourse in early relationship stages, revealing nuanced social taboos and behavioral hierarchies that diverged from pure biological risk models.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual framework underlying the Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale synthesizes principles from sociological sexual script theory, social exchange theory, evolutionary psychology, and Reiss’s sociological theory of sexual permissiveness.

1. Reiss’s Propositional Theory of Premarital Sexual Permissiveness

The foundational intellectual root of the PSPS is the theoretical work of Ira L. Reiss (1964, 1967). Reiss proposed that societies, subcultures, and individuals operate within four primary premarital sexual standards:

1. Abstinence: Sexual intercourse is wrong for everyone prior to formal marriage, regardless of affection or stage of courtship.
2. Double Standard: Premarital intercourse is acceptable for males (often under casual conditions) but unacceptable or severely stigmatized for females. Reiss differentiated between the “orthodox” double standard (women must remain virgins until marriage, whereas men may engage in intercourse freely) and the “transitional” double standard (women may engage in intercourse if engaged or in love, whereas men may do so without affection).
3. Permissiveness with Affection: Sexual intercourse is acceptable for both men and women provided there is a stable, reciprocal emotional bond, romantic love, or high relational commitment.
4. Permissiveness without Affection: Intercourse is acceptable for both sexes on the basis of physical attraction or mutual consent alone, independent of romantic love or prospective marriage.

Reiss utilized Guttman scaling techniques to demonstrate that these standards form a cumulative, unidimensional progression. Sprecher and colleagues (1988) retained Reiss’s sociological rigor while updating the instrument into a modern Likert metric, allowing for superior variance modeling, parametric analyses, and more precise structural equation modeling (SEM).

2. Sexual Script Theory

According to Sexual Script Theory, formulated by sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon (1973; Simon & Gagnon, 1986), human sexual behavior is neither purely biological nor instinctual. Instead, it is governed by socially learned cognitive blueprints—scripts—operating across three systemic levels: cultural scenarios (societal mandates, religious dogmas, legal structures), interpersonal scripts (negotiations between partners regarding behavioral pacing), and intrapsychic scripts (personal desires, fantasies, and moral justifications). The PSPS explicitly operationalizes interpersonal scripts by measuring cognitive rules regarding “who does what to whom, when, and under what relational conditions.” The scale maps how individuals internalize cultural scripts regarding the appropriateness of physical intimacy as relationships mature over time.

3. Social Exchange Theory and Equity Theory

From the perspective of Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964; Sprecher, 1998), interpersonal relationships develop through the reciprocal exchange of tangible and intangible rewards, investments, and costs. In traditional dating dynamics, physical intimacy was historically framed as a valuable social and reproductive resource offered within an implicit exchange matrix where relational commitment, security, and emotional exclusivity served as reciprocal investments. The progressive acceptance of sexual behaviors across increasing stages of commitment in the PSPS mirrors this exchange logic: as the partner invests greater time (e.g., “dating almost a year”) or formal status pledges (“pre-engaged” or “engaged”), the perceived relational equity balance legitimizes higher levels of physical intimacy.

4. Parental Investment Theory and the Evolutionary Paradigm

Parental Investment Theory (Trivers, 1972) and Sexual Strategies Theory (Buss & Schmitt, 1993) predict fundamental asymmetries between male and female mating psychologies due to differences in obligatory biological investment in offspring. Because biological females historically bore higher physical and energetic costs associated with pregnancy and lactation, natural selection favored females who exercised greater discrimination and required evidence of paternal investment, commitment, and resource provisioning before granting sexual access. Conversely, male fitness was historically maximized through both short-term opportunistic mating and long-term pair bonding. Within this evolutionary framework, the sex differences systematically captured by the PSPS—wherein men report significantly higher permissiveness at early, low-commitment courtship stages (first date, casual dating) while converge with women at high-commitment stages—represent the sociocognitive manifestations of sexually dimorphic evolved mating psychologies.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale has been empirically substantiated through multiple decades of empirical investigations covering construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related domains.

1. Construct and Known-Groups Validity

Construct validity is prominently evidenced by the scale’s ability to consistently replicate theoretical predictions regarding gender differences and target-specific double standards across diverse demographic populations (Sprecher, 1989; Sprecher et al., 1988). When evaluating standards for the self, male respondents score substantially higher on premarital sexual permissiveness than female respondents, with the effect sizes being largest at low relational commitment stages:

• First Date Acceptance: Men consistently report significantly higher agreement than women (Cohen’s d typically ranging from 0.45 to 0.70), demonstrating greater acceptance of uncommitted sexual contact.
• Casual Dating Acceptance: Men continue to exhibit significantly greater permissiveness than women (d ≈ 0.40 to 0.60).
• Serious Dating and Betrothal: At the stages of serious dating, pre-engagement, and engagement, the male-female gap narrows substantially (d < 0.20), showing a convergence where both sexes endorse high levels of permissiveness once affection, exclusivity, and commitment are firmly established.

Furthermore, when the PSPS is administered with alternate target referents (e.g., evaluating standards for a male peer versus a female peer), the instrument successfully captures nuances of the sexual double standard. Sprecher (1989) demonstrated that while both men and women held more egalitarian standards in modern cohorts than in historical eras, subtle double standards persisted wherein female casual sexual encounters were evaluated more critically, particularly by male evaluators.

2. Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established through robust, theoretically anticipated correlations with numerous validated sexual, personality, and relationship measures:

• Sociosexual Orientation: The 5-item sexual intercourse subscale of the PSPS correlates strongly and positively with the attitudinal and behavioral subscales of the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI) developed by Simpson and Gangestad (1991), with correlation coefficients typically ranging between r = .48 and r = .64 (p < .001). Individuals exhibiting an “unrestricted” sociosexual orientation report markedly higher PSPS scores, particularly on items assessing first-date and casual-dating permissiveness.
• Sexual Sensation Seeking: Scores on the PSPS demonstrate significant positive associations with the Sexual Sensation Seeking Scale (Kalichman et al., 1994), yielding coefficients between r = .35 and r = .52, corroborating that sensory and exploratory drives manifest in broader cognitive acceptance of premarital intercourse.
• Erotophilia versus Erotophobia: Significant positive correlations are documented with the Sexual Opinion Survey (SOS; Fisher et al., 1988), indicating that individuals with erotophilic dispositions (positive affective reactions to sexual stimuli) score significantly higher on the PSPS (r ≈ .40 to .55).
• Lifetime Sexual Partner Count: In criterion validation paradigms, PSPS scores correlate positively with actual behavioral metrics, including lifetime number of coital partners (r ≈ .30 to .45) and earlier age at coital debut.

3. Discriminant and Divergent Validity

The PSPS exhibits robust discriminant validity against constructs that are theoretically distinct from contextual sexual permissiveness:

• Religiosity and Traditional Orthodoxy: As predicted by sociological models, PSPS scores correlate inversely and strongly with intrinsic religiosity, frequency of religious attendance, and adherence to theological fundamentalism (r values typically ranging from -.38 to -.58), demonstrating that institutional religious socialization suppresses endorsement of premarital sexual activity.
• Generalized Social Desirability: When administered alongside instruments measuring social desirability response biases (such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), the PSPS yields trivial and non-significant correlations (typically r = -.06 to -.11), confirming that respondent scores reflect genuine personal and moral attitudes rather than simple socially compliant self-presentation.
• Generalized Neuroticism: The scale shows near-zero associations with broad personality traits such as generalized trait anxiety or neuroticism (r < .08), demonstrating that sexual permissiveness represents a domain-specific socio-attitudinal schema rather than an artifact of emotional instability or psychological distress.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale has been evaluated extensively across exploratory development, large-scale normative sampling, and contemporary replications. Across multiple decades of empirical research, the instrument consistently satisfies and exceeds conventional benchmarks for internal consistency, split-half reliability, and temporal stability.

1. Internal Consistency Reliability

In the original validation study by Sprecher, McKinney, Walsh, and Anderson (1988), internal consistency for the composite 15-item scale and its constituent behavioral subscales was exceptionally high. For the full 15-item behavioral-relational matrix, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeded .92.

For the widely implemented 5-item subscale measuring the acceptability of sexual intercourse for the self across the five relational stages, psychometric reliability remains remarkably stable across diverse cohorts:

• Benchmark Undergraduate Cohort: In an extensive, multi-year dataset comprising over 6,000 undergraduate students matriculating at a major Midwestern public university, Sprecher documented a Cronbach’s alpha of .82 for the 5-item intercourse self-scale.
• Extended Independent Samples: Subsequent studies examining emerging adults and broader adult community populations have reported Cronbach’s alpha estimates ranging from .80 to .88 for the 5-item self-report scale, and alphas ranging from .85 to .91 when assessing generic peer targets (e.g., “acceptable for a male” or “acceptable for a female”).
• Subscale Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the five intercourse items consistently remain robust, with typical values falling between r = .52 and r = .74. Items 2 (casual dating) and 3 (serious dating) routinely demonstrate the highest discrimination and item-total correlations, reflecting their central location on the commitment continuum.

2. Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

Investigations utilizing longitudinal panels and short-term test-retest intervals (spanning 2 to 6 weeks) demonstrate high temporal stability for the PSPS. In test-retest reliability assessments among emerging adults in stable non-marital relationships, Pearson correlation coefficients ranged from r = .78 to .86 across a 4-week interval, indicating that although sexual attitudes are responsive to major shifts in personal relationship status (such as moving from casual dating into an exclusive engagement), baseline individual differences in permissiveness represent highly stable cognitive-attitudinal orientations.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale has been scrutinized using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse academic investigations.

1. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When the original 15-item instrument—incorporating heavy petting, sexual intercourse, and oral-genital sex across five stages—is subjected to exploratory factor analysis with principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood extraction and oblique rotation (e.g., Promax or Direct Oblimin), two distinct structural patterns emerge depending on the analytical focus:

• Unidimensional General Permissiveness Factor: A dominant first unrotated general factor accounts for 55% to 68% of the total variance, with all 15 items loading heavily (factor loadings > .60). This indicates that an overarching, generalized latent disposition toward sexual permissiveness exerts powerful influence across all behaviors and stages.
• Two-Factor Oblique Solution: When multi-factor solutions are extracted, items consistently bifurcate based on the relational commitment threshold rather than purely biological behavior:
• Factor 1: Early-Stage / Low-Commitment Permissiveness: Encompasses items assessing petting, intercourse, and oral sex on a first date and during casual dating. This factor accounts for the largest proportion of unique variance and represents uncommitted, non-relational sexual autonomy.
• Factor 2: Advanced-Stage / Committed Permissiveness: Comprises items assessing behaviors during serious dating, pre-engagement, and engagement. Items in this factor display lower variance and higher overall mean acceptance due to normative ceiling effects.

When factor analyzing the standard 5-item sexual intercourse subscale, EFA reliably extracts a single, robust unidimensional factor explaining between 58% and 66% of the variance, with eigenvalues exceeding 2.80 and no secondary factor exhibiting an eigenvalue above 0.85.

2. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit Indices

Confirmatory factor analyses testing the unidimensional model of the 5-item sexual intercourse subscale have established excellent structural fit across both male and female cohorts. In structural equation modeling evaluations utilizing maximum likelihood estimation, representative goodness-of-fit indices consistently meet or exceed modern psychometric standards:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 to .99 (benchmark ≥ .95)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .94 to .98 (benchmark ≥ .95)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .045 to .068 (90% CI [.032, .078]; benchmark ≤ .08)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .025 to .042 (benchmark ≤ .05)

3. Factor Loadings for the 5-Item Sexual Intercourse Subscale

Typical standardized factor loadings (λ) obtained from confirmatory factor analytic models on university student and emerging adult samples are summarized in the following table:

As illustrated above, Items 2 and 3 load most robustly onto the latent permissiveness factor. Item 5 displays slightly lower standardized loadings due to ceiling effects in contemporary secular cultures, where refusal to endorse intercourse during engagement is statistically rare. Measurement invariance analyses across biological sex confirm configural and metric invariance (ΔCFI < .01), establishing that the scale assesses the identical psychological construct with equivalent measurement units across men and women.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale (PSPS)
• Alternative Titles: Revised Reiss Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale, Sprecher Sexual Permissiveness Scale
• Authors: Susan Sprecher, Kathleen McKinney, Robert Walsh, and Carrie Anderson (1988); Susan Sprecher (1989)
• Construct Assessed: Moral, social, and personal acceptability of premarital sexual behaviors conditioned on relational commitment stages
• Assessment Type: Self-report questionnaire; psychometric rating scale
• Target Populations: Emerging adults, university students, dating couples, adults, and parent-proxy raters evaluating youth sexual standards
• Item Count:
  • Standard Brief Form: 5 items (focusing exclusively on sexual intercourse across 5 relationship stages)
  • Comprehensive Full Form: 15 items (evaluating heavy petting, sexual intercourse, and oral-genital sex across 5 relationship stages)
  • Ultra-Brief Screening Form: 3 items (first date, casual dating, serious dating)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), or mobile/web-based assessment platform
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes for the 5-item version; 4 to 6 minutes for the full 15-item matrix
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert-type response scale:
  • Agree Strongly
  • Agree Moderately
  • Agree Slightly
  • Disagree Slightly
  • Disagree Moderately
  • Disagree Strongly
• Scoring and Transformation Rules:
  • Responses are numerically coded from 1 to 6. For ease of theoretical interpretation, options are reverse-scored such that Agree Strongly = 6, Agree Moderately = 5, Agree Slightly = 4, Disagree Slightly = 3, Disagree Moderately = 2, and Disagree Strongly = 1. Under this coding scheme, higher numerical values denote greater premarital sexual permissiveness.
  • A composite total score can be computed either as the arithmetic mean of the completed items (range: 1.00 to 6.00) or as a linear sum (range: 5 to 30 for the 5-item version). The arithmetic mean is strongly recommended to preserve scale metric interpretability and facilitate direct comparisons across modified subscales.
  • When multiple referent versions are administered within the same investigation (e.g., Target: Self; Target: Generic Male; Target: Generic Female), total scores must be calculated separately for each target to permit within-subject repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) or dyadic multilevel modeling.
• Dimensional Subscales:
  • 5-Item Intercourse Scale: Evaluates coital acceptability across the five sequential relational stages.
  • Behavioral Subscales (15-item version): Petting Permissiveness Subscale (5 items), Intercourse Permissiveness Subscale (5 items), and Oral-Genital Permissiveness Subscale (5 items).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale was originally published in 1988 by Susan Sprecher, Kathleen McKinney, Robert Walsh, and Carrie Anderson in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, with subsequent refinements and single-behavior subscale adaptations published by Sprecher in 1989 in The Journal of Sex Research. The instrument is considered an open-access academic measurement tool available free of charge for non-commercial research, educational instruction, and clinical application.

No formal licensing fees, commercial royalties, or purchase authorizations are required to utilize, administer, or adapt the scale items for scientific investigations. However, standard academic ethical conventions necessitate appropriate scholarly citation of the original validation articles (Sprecher et al., 1988; Sprecher, 1989) in any empirical publication, thesis, dissertation, or conference presentation resulting from its use. Researchers adapting the target wording (e.g., creating parent-proxy evaluations or specific sexual-minority target forms) are encouraged to contact Dr. Susan Sprecher at Illinois State University ([email protected]) for updated normative parameters or comparative reference datasets.

References

• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual Strategies Theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100(2), 204–232. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.2.204
• Crawford, M., & Popp, D. (2003). Sexual double standards: A review and reformulation of theory and research. The Journal of Sex Research, 40(1), 13–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490309552163
• Fisher, W. A., Byrne, D., White, L. A., & Kelley, K. (1988). Erotophobia-erotophilia as a dimension of personality. The Journal of Sex Research, 25(1), 123–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551448
• Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973). Sexual conduct: The social sources of human sexuality. Aldine Publishing Company.
• Kalichman, S. C., Johnson, J. R., Adair, V., Rompa, D., Multhauf, K., & Kelly, J. A. (1994). Sexual sensation seeking: Scale development and predicting AIDS-risk behavior among homosexually active men. Journal of Personality Assessment, 62(3), 385–397. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa6203_1
• Reiss, I. L. (1964). The scaling of premarital sexual permissiveness. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 26(2), 188–198. https://doi.org/10.2307/349723
• Reiss, I. L. (1967). The social context of premarital sexual permissiveness. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• Simon, W., & Gagnon, J. H. (1986). Sexual scripts: Permanence and change. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15(2), 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542219
• Simpson, J. A., & Gangestad, S. W. (1991). Individual differences in sociosexuality: Evidence for convergent and discriminant validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(6), 870–883. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.6.870
• Sprecher, S. (1989). Premarital sexual standards for different categories of individuals. The Journal of Sex Research, 26(2), 232–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498909551509
• Sprecher, S. (1998). Social exchange perspectives on sexual satisfaction and frequency in heterosexual relationships. Journal of Sex Research, 35(1), 32–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499809551915
• Sprecher, S., McKinney, K., Walsh, R., & Anderson, C. (1988). A revision of the Reiss Premarital Sexual Permissiveness Scale. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 50(3), 821–828. https://doi.org/10.2307/352650
• Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (pp. 136–179). Aldine Publishing Company.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)