Multidimensional Sexual Well-being Scale for Older Adults: Validity Evidence from a Polish Sample

Abstract

Here, we report the results of a Polish adaptation of the Multidimensional Sexual Well-being Scale (MSWBS) for older adults. The MSWBS is a short self-report scale for assessing the five dimensions of an individual’s sexual well-being: frequency of caressing, sexual intimacy, sexual compliance, sexual satisfaction, and sexual distress. The aim of our adaptation was to examine the utility of the scale in a country with conservative views on the sexuality of older people, which will help health care providers and researchers to better understand the sexual needs of older people. The study included 507 participants, aged 60–92. We found the reliability of the scale to be satisfactory (Cronbach’s alpha = .71–.87). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed a good fit of the data to a five-factor model. This study demonstrates that the MSWBS-PL is connected to general life satisfaction and diversity of sexual activity, confirming the scale’s validity.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2021.1991535

Acknowledgment

We thank Dr. J Slone-Murphy, ELS, from NeuroEdit Ltd, for editing a draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (KS) upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Lack of interest in having sex; lack of enjoyment in sex; feeling anxious during sex; feeling physical

pain as a result of sex; feeling no excitement or arousal during sex; not reaching climax (experience an orgasm) or taking a long time to reach a climax despite feeling excited/aroused; reaching a climax (experienced an orgasm) more quickly than desired; uncomfortably dry vagina (female participants only); trouble getting or keeping an erection (male participants only).

2 Parameters of the original factorial solution are available from the corresponding author on request.

3 Due to a low correlation of distress with other scales, we also tested a four-factor model without the distress subscale. The fit indices suggested a perfect fit to data, significantly better than in 5-factor model (χ² = 10.457; p = .015), but it is, probably because of the low degrees of freedom (Kenny et al., 2015), so the results might not describe the structure properly: RMSEA = .000, RMSEA 90% CI [.000; .000], χ² (5, 304) = 0.056; p & .05, CFI = 1.000. We decided to use the original 5-dimensional model.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of Psychology, Opole University.