The Revised Mosher Sex-Guilt Scale: Its Psychometric Properties and a Proposed Ten-Item Version

Abstract

Mosher introduced his Forced-Choice Guilt Inventory some 40 years ago and, over the following decades, his subscale measuring sex guilt has been the most widely used measure of this construct. Mosher revised his instrument in 1998, but he did not provide data regarding the reliability of the scale, its construct validity, or its overlap with the original scale. In this study, a sample of 272 undergraduate college students (95 men and 177 women) were administered both the original Mosher Forced-Choice Guilt Inventory and the Revised Mosher Sex-Guilt Scale, a Non-Acceptance of Sexuality Scale, and several items regarding their sexual experiences. Results of this study provide support for the psychometric soundness of the 50-item Revised Mosher Sex-Guilt Scale. Results also revealed that the 50-item scale had a high degree of overlap with the original forced-choice version, and that it had statistically significant correlations in the predicted directions with the sexual experiences items. This study also proposes a brief 10-item version of Mosher's 50-item scale, which has similar psychometric characteristics and could serve as an efficient substitute for the longer scale.

Acknowledgments

We thank Christina Dodson for her assistance in collecting the data.

Notes

Note. N = 272. Mosher F-C = Mosher Forced-Choice Guilt Inventory; Rev. Mosher = Revised Mosher Sex-Guilt Scale; Brief Mosher = brief Mosher Sex-Guilt Scale; N-A Sex = Non-Acceptance of Sexuality Scale; Had sex = response to “I have had sexual intercourse” (percentage reflects number of respondents who answered “yes” to this question); Age sex = response to “How old were you when you first had sexual intercourse?”; Satisfied dec = response to “How satisfied were you with your decision to have sex at this age?” (lower scores indicate greater satisfaction); Partners = response to “How many sexual partners have you had during the past year?”

^a n = 229.

^b n = 235.

^c n = 270.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Note. R = reverse scored.

*p < .001.