Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory

Abstract

The Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory (R-ATSI; Patton & Mannison, 1995) is a specialized psychometric instrument constructed to evaluate multifaceted sociosexual beliefs, with particular emphasis on rape myth acceptance, sexual coercion, developmental sexuality, and gender role stereotyping. Developed in response to emerging public health and psychological discourse surrounding sexual violence, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and unintended pregnancy during the 1980s and 1990s, the R-ATSI refines an earlier 72-item curriculum evaluation questionnaire down to a 40-item self-report inventory. The instrument utilizes a forced-choice 6-point Likert response format ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, systematically omitting a neutral midpoint to compel respondents toward decisive evaluative positions. Psychometric evaluation of the R-ATSI reveals a solid dimensional architecture anchored by three primary, empirically reliable factors: Attitudes Toward Sexual Coercion and Assault (12 items), Attitudes Toward Sexuality Issues (8 items), and Attitudes Toward Gender Roles (5 items), alongside exploratory items addressing broader sociosexual domains. The scale exhibits robust internal consistency, yielding an overall Cronbach’s alpha of .85, with subscale alphas spanning .68 to .85. Construct and known-groups validity have been demonstrated through significant gender differences across coercion and gender-role items, as well as documented sensitivity to educational interventions in university human sexuality courses. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric exposition of the R-ATSI, detailing its theoretical lineage, factorial integrity, diagnostic scoring algorithms, and ongoing utility across developmental, educational, and social psychological research.

Keywords

Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory, R-ATSI, sexual coercion, rape myth acceptance, gender role stereotyping, psychometrics, sexuality education, sexual assault attitudes, scale validation, factor analysis

Authors

The Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory was conceptualized, psychometrically validated, and refined by:

• Wendy Patton, Ph.D. — School of Learning and Development, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Kelvin Grove Campus, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. (E-mail: [email protected]).
• Mary Mannison, M.Ed. — School of Learning and Development, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory is to quantify the cognitive structures, belief frameworks, and normative judgments that individuals maintain regarding human sexuality, with an analytical lens trained on sexual coercion, interpersonal power dynamics, and societal gender expectations. Originating in tertiary educational contexts, the inventory was initially engineered to assess longitudinal attitudinal shifts resulting from formal instruction in human sexuality (Patton & Mannison, 1993, 1994). However, its functional utility rapidly expanded into clinical, sociological, and forensic investigative domains.

From an applied perspective, the R-ATSI addresses several pressing empirical and social imperatives:

• Evaluation of Educational Interventions: The scale serves as a standardized pre-test and post-test measurement tool capable of identifying subtle cognitive adjustments following sexual health, consent, and bystander intervention programs.
• Identification of Coercion Tolerance: The instrument identifies cognitive schemas that rationalize or trivialize sexual violence, date rape, victim blaming, and interpersonal coercion. Measuring these latent constructs is essential for primary prevention initiatives on college campuses and within secondary schools.
• Assessment of Sociosexual Pluralism: The inventory gauges endorsement of healthy sexual expression across diverse stages of lifespan development (e.g., childhood sexual curiosity, sexuality among institutionalized geriatric populations) and across marginalized orientations (e.g., civil and relational parity for lesbian and gay individuals).
• Deconstruction of Gender Role Rigidity: By contextualizing sexual beliefs within the broader matrix of patriarchal gender expectations, the scale clarifies how traditional scripts regarding masculinity and femininity sustain coercive interpersonal conduct.

The theoretical rationale rests on the principle that coercive sexual behavior does not occur in a sociocultural vacuum; rather, it is mediated and legitimized by prevailing cognitive schemas, rape supportive cultures, and institutionalized double standards. By providing a multidimensional, psychometrically defensible assessment, the R-ATSI allows researchers to map the interconnections between macro-level cultural norms and micro-level individual endorsements of coercion.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the R-ATSI is multidimensional sociosexual attitudes, defined as organized affective, cognitive, and evaluative predispositions toward sexual practices, behavioral consent, gender norms, and institutional regulation of sexual conduct. Unlike unidimensional measures of sexual conservatism or eroticism, the R-ATSI approaches sexuality as an ideological and behavioral nexus where power, interpersonal morality, and bodily autonomy intersect.

Factor 1: Attitudes Toward Sexual Coercion and Assault

This dimension encompasses belief systems that justify, minimize, or mischaracterize non-consensual sexual pressure, physical force, and acquaintance rape. It includes distinct facets of rape myth acceptance (Burt, 1980):

• Victim Blaming and Attribution of Responsibility: Believing that victims invite or provoke sexual victimization through attire, alcohol consumption, necking, or ambiguous interpersonal cues (e.g., Item 18: “Women who are raped are usually a little to blame for the crime”; Item 37: “If a girl engages in necking or petting and she lets things get out of hand, it is her own fault if her partner forces sex on her”).
• Male Entitlement and Transactional Sexuality: Endorsing the notion that financial expenditure, long-term dating, or romantic courtship obligates a partner to provide sexual access (e.g., Item 17: “If the couple have dated a long time, it’s only natural for the guy to pressure her for sex”; Item 25: “If a guy spends a lot of money on a girl, he’s got a right to expect a few sexual favours”).
• Denial of Female Autonomy and Fabricated Consent: Believing that token resistance is widespread or that women covertly desire sexual dominance (e.g., Item 1: “Some girls will only respond sexually if a little force is used”; Item 5: “A girl will often pretend she doesn’t want intercourse because she doesn’t want to seem loose, but she’s really hoping the guy will force her”).
• Fabrication and False Allegation Schemas: Rationalizing reports of acquaintance rape as post-coital regret or manipulative bids for attention (e.g., Item 2: “Women falsely report rape in order to call attention to themselves”; Item 38: “A woman who claims she was raped by a man she knows can be described as a ‘woman who changed her mind afterward'”).

Factor 2: Attitudes Toward Sexuality Issues

This subscale evaluates tolerance, permissiveness, and non-judgmental acceptance regarding diverse expressions of human sexuality across the developmental spectrum and social domains:

• Lifespan and Non-Reproductive Sexuality: Validating the natural emergence of autoeroticism across childhood and adulthood, alongside sexual expression among older individuals (e.g., Item 7: “Children should be encouraged to accept the practice of masturbation”; Item 19: “The elderly in nursing homes should have as much sexual access to each other as they want”; Item 23: “Masturbation is a normal sexual activity throughout life”).
• Reproductive Autonomy and Prevention: Endorsement of bodily sovereignty and harm-reduction infrastructure, including abortion access and adolescent contraceptive distribution (e.g., Item 4: “A woman’s decision to have an abortion is a good enough reason to have one”; Item 20: “Contraceptives should be readily available to teenagers”).

Factor 3: Attitudes Toward Gender Roles

This dimension examines adherence to rigid, patriarchal sex-role standards, double standards governing behavioral propriety, and ideological opposition to non-heteronormative identity expressions:

• Double Standards of Propriety: Differential moral evaluations applied to male versus female conduct (e.g., Item 32: “Intoxication among women is worse than among men”).
• Normalization of Street Harassment: Framing non-consensual objectification as benign or flattering (e.g., Item 28: “Being whistled at in public is like getting a compliment”).
• Institutional Heteronormativity: Conceptualizing non-heterosexual identities as structural threats to society (e.g., Item 35: “Male and female homosexuality is a threat to many of society’s institutions”).

Theoretical Framework

The construction of the R-ATSI is grounded in several convergent social and psychological theories: feminist analyses of sexual violence, Martha Burt’s rape culture model, social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), and gender schema theory (Bem, 1981).

Feminist Theory and Rape Culture Models

Feminist psychopathology and criminological theory (Brownmiller, 1975) posit that sexual assault is neither a biological inevitability nor primarily a crime of uncontrollable sexual desire; rather, it constitutes a structural assertion of power, control, and intimidation designed to preserve male dominance. Martha Burt (1980) formalized this paradigm psychometrically by articulating how cultural myths—defined as false, stereotyped, or prejudicial beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists—function as cognitive buffers that legitimize sexual aggression. The R-ATSI incorporates Burt’s foundational categories (Sexual Conservatism, Rape Myth Acceptance, Interpersonal Violence, and Sex Role Stereotyping) and operationalizes them within dating contexts familiar to late adolescents and emerging adults.

Social Learning and Script Theory

According to sexual script theory (Simon & Gagnon, 1986), sexual behavior is orchestrated by cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic schemas that dictate who does what, when, where, and why. In Western patriarchal cultures, traditional heteronormative scripts assign men the proactive role of sexual aggressor or pursuer and cast women as passive gatekeepers. The R-ATSI measures adherence to scripts that obscure affirmative consent, such as the myth of token female resistance (the script claiming women say “no” when they mean “yes”) and the transactional debt script (the premise that romantic or monetary investments demand sexual remuneration).

Cognitive Consistency and Attribution Theory

Under attribution theory (Heider, 1958; Weiner, 1985) and the just-world hypothesis (Lerner, 1980), individuals display cognitive motivations to attribute blame to victims rather than perpetrators. By concluding that a victim engaged in provocative dress, careless alcohol intake, or consensual necking, observers preserve the comforting illusion that sexual victimization is avoidable and non-random. The R-ATSI captures these defensive cognitive attributions across multiple contextual scenarios.

Validity

The construct, criterion-related, and ecological validity of the R-ATSI have been verified across progressive developmental phases and empirical investigations (Patton & Mannison, 1993, 1994, 1995).

Content and Face Validity

Initial item pools (comprising 72 items across 10 categories) were derived from psychometrically validated inventories, including Burt’s (1980) scales, Spence et al.’s (1973) Attitudes Toward Women Scale, Herek’s (1988) measures of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, and Feild’s (1978) rape attitude measures. Content validity was established via independent expert panels consisting of university-level human sexuality professors and secondary school sexual health educators. Items exhibiting archaic phrasing, ambiguous colloquialisms, or ceiling/floor effects were systematically adjusted or excised (Hall, Howard, & Boezio, 1986; Patton & Mannison, 1995).

Known-Groups and Construct Validity

Robust evidence for construct validity is demonstrated through consistent, statistically significant gender differentiation across the underlying dimensions:

• Factor 1 (Sexual Coercion and Assault): Univariate analyses of variance (ANOVA) conducted by Patton and Mannison (1995) revealed statistically significant disparities between male and female respondents across all 12 items, with 10 items reaching significance at p < .001. In every instance, male respondents exhibited higher mean scores (indicating less disagreement with coercion and rape myths), whereas female respondents reported significantly stronger rejection of coercive practices.
• Factor 2 (Sexuality Issues): While the composite factor score showed parity between sexes (reflecting shared broad orientations toward sexual expression), item-level analyses revealed that women displayed significantly greater acceptance of child and geriatric sexual exploration, alongside significantly higher tolerance of non-heterosexual orientations.
• Factor 3 (Gender Roles): All five constituent items yielded significant differences between men and women, with male participants demonstrating significantly higher endorsement of traditional patriarchal double standards, tolerance of street harassment, and institutional anxieties regarding homosexuality.

Sensitivity to Change (Interventional Validity)

The inventory has repeatedly documented high sensitivity to educational interventions. In pre- and post-test investigations of university students enrolled in human sexuality curricula (N = 115; Patton & Mannison, 1993, 1994), completion of coursework resulted in statistically significant reductions in rape myth acceptance, decreased victim-blaming attributions, and elevated endorsement of sexual pluralism, proving the instrument’s utility for longitudinal program evaluation.

Reliability

The reliability of the R-ATSI has been confirmed using standard psychometric indices of internal consistency across multiple student and community cohorts.

Internal Consistency

Psychometric testing conducted by Patton and Mannison (1995) yielded the following Cronbach’s alpha coefficients:

• Full Scale R-ATSI (40 items): α = .85, indicating excellent overall internal consistency across broad sociosexual domains.
• Factor 1 (Attitudes Toward Sexual Coercion and Assault; 12 items): α = .85, reflecting strong inter-item covariance and construct homogeneity regarding coercive schemas.
• Factor 2 (Attitudes Toward Sexuality Issues; 8 items): α = .79, demonstrating acceptable to high reliability for capturing multidimensional sociosexual permissiveness and lifespan issues.
• Factor 3 (Attitudes Toward Gender Roles; 5 items): α = .68, acceptable reliability for a compact 5-item index measuring conservative sex-role expectations.

Standard Error of Measurement and Stability

Item-total correlation analyses confirmed that all factor-defining items correlated positively with their respective subscale composites. The elimination of ambiguous items from the 72-item precursor significantly reduced measurement error, attenuating response fatigue and stabilizing item variance.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the R-ATSI was established via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with orthogonal and oblique rotations (Patton & Mannison, 1995), conducted to condense the original 72-item, 10-domain matrix into a stable latent structure.

Factor Extraction and Loadings

Factor analytical procedures revealed three distinct, theoretically coherent factors that accounted for the majority of shared variance, while two minor latent factors exhibited unstable or underdetermined structures:

• Factor 1 (Attitudes Toward Sexual Coercion and Assault): Composed of 12 primary items (Items 2, 5, 6, 13, 17, 18, 25, 27, 29, 33, 37, 38). These items consistently loaded onto a primary dimension reflecting date rape myths, male sexual entitlement, victim precipitation, and the normalization of physical or emotional pressure.
• Factor 2 (Attitudes Toward Sexuality Issues): Composed of 8 primary items (Items 4, 7, 8, 15, 19, 20, 23, 35). This dimension captured values surrounding sexual expression across life stages (masturbation, childhood games, elderly nursing home autonomy), reproductive choice, and sociosexual policy.
• Factor 3 (Attitudes Toward Gender Roles): Composed of 5 items (Items 9, 28, 31, 32, 35). This factor captured institutional conservatism, gendered behavioral double standards, and heteronormative assumptions. Item 35 (“Male and female homosexuality is a threat to many of society’s institutions”) demonstrated salient cross-loading across both Factor 2 and Factor 3, reflecting its dual conceptual relevance to general sexuality issues and patriarchal role preservation.

The remaining items within the 40-item instrument capture complementary facets of sexuality (such as AIDS stigma, child sexual abuse attributions, and gender equity laws) that contribute to the aggregate inventory score (α = .85) while functioning as exploratory indicators in granular social psychological analyses.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administration guidelines for the R-ATSI are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory (R-ATSI)
• Authors: Wendy Patton, Ph.D., and Mary Mannison, M.Ed. (Queensland University of Technology)
• Original Publication Date: 1995 (preliminary 72-item versions published in 1993, 1994)
• Assessment Format: 40-item self-report questionnaire
• Administration Mode: Paper-and-pencil or secure computerized/digital administration
• Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes
• Response Scale: 6-point forced-choice Likert scale (no neutral midpoint):
  • SA = Strongly Agree (1)
  • A = Agree (2)
  • MA = Mildly Agree (3)
  • MD = Mildly Disagree (4)
  • D = Disagree (5)
  • SD = Strongly Disagree (6)
• Scoring and Item Reversals:
  • To minimize acquiescence response bias, seven items are reverse-scored: Items 4, 7, 13, 15, 19, 20, and 23.
  • For reverse-scored items, values are recoded as: SA = 6, A = 5, MA = 4, MD = 3, D = 2, SD = 1.
  • For standard items, scoring follows direct numerical coding: SA = 1, A = 2, MA = 3, MD = 4, D = 5, SD = 6, or recoded according to subscale directionality protocols (see below).
• Subscale Interpretative Directionality:
  • Attitudes Toward Sexual Coercion and Assault (Factor 1): Higher cumulative scores reflect greater acceptance of rape myths and sexual coercion.
  • Attitudes Toward Sexuality Issues (Factor 2): Higher cumulative scores reflect less traditional (more permissive, open, and progressive) attitudes toward sexuality.
  • Attitudes Toward Gender Roles (Factor 3): Higher cumulative scores reflect more traditional, rigid, and patriarchal attitudes toward gender roles.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Revised Attitudes Toward Sexuality Inventory was formalized in 1995 following preliminary empirical testing in 1993 and 1994. The instrument was developed within an academic research institution (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia) and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Sex Education and Therapy (now the American Journal of Sexuality Education).

The scale is generally accessible without licensing fees for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical evaluation, and dissertation investigations. Researchers wishing to reproduce, modify, or translate the inventory for empirical studies are advised to contact the primary author:

• Contact: Prof. Wendy Patton
• Institutional Affiliation: School of Learning and Development, Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove Campus 4059, Brisbane, Australia
• Electronic Correspondence: [email protected]

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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)