Adaptation and Validation of the Sexuality Attitudes and Beliefs Scale for the Italian Context

Abstract

Background: Nurses dealing with a patient’s sexuality must start from an awareness of their own experience, specific attitudes, and possible limits. What emerges from the literature is a conservative tendency in nurses, which underlines the difficulty in this awareness, but even a difficulty in improving the necessary knowledge/skills. It is, therefore, essential to create tools that can raise awareness of these limits. Objective: the present study aims to explore the psychometric properties of the Attitudes and Beliefs about Sexuality Scale, adapted and validated for the Italian context. Method: This is an instrumental, cross-sectional piece of research, whose SABS validation process applies the steps of Beaton and Valmi. The convenience sample collected data from 223 participants in the first approach. This was followed by a retest involving 44 students randomly selected from those who responded in the first phase. Ethical principles were respected. Results: The SABS questionnaire demonstrated good test–retest reliability, good internal consistency, and adequate construct validity. Conclusions: The Italian version of the SABS is valid and reliable for use with nursing students. This is the fourth language in which the SABS is available for research.

Sex Education Actions at Universities: The Creation, Validity and Reliability of a Satisfaction Scale

“…Data analysis was performed both on the full questionnaire and on the main factors that emerged from the factor analysis. Internal consistency and reliability were analyzed with Cronbach's alpha [41] and construct validity was analyzed by exploratory factor analysis by assigning items to factors with the highest loadings with principal component analysis and the varimax rotation method [42][43][44], and confirmatory factor analysis to guess the possible relationships between latent variables [45][46][47]. Descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha and exploratory factor analysis were performed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences, SPSS, version 29 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA), and confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS version 29 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA).…”

“…The reliability was measured through internal consistency provided by the Cronbach alpha coefficient, yielding a value of 0.638 for the 19 items, which is low according to George and Mallery [45,50]. Providing the low value, the coefficient with the extracted items was calculated and is shown in Table 1.…”

A Multicentric Pilot Study of Student Nurse Attitudes and Beliefs toward Sexual Healthcare

“…The lowest mean previously reported in the literature was 30.62 [ 14 ]. Other SABS means with nursing students reported in the mid-range have been 32.54, 32.38, 36.69, and 38.08 [ 15 , 18 , 19 , 26 ]. The higher end of means with nursing students have been reported as 41.55 and 42.3 [ 15 , 18 ].…”

“…The SABS was created in English, and this study used the original version as well as versions of the SABS that had been validated for use in Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish. The Portuguese version [ 25 ] reported Cronbach’s alphas of 0.72 and 0.80, the Italian version [ 26 ] showed a 0.76, and the Spanish version [ 27 ] showed a 0.65. These validated versions of the SABS were used in this study based on the dominant language spoken in each country.…”

“…Conversely, lower scores indicate more positive attitudes to sexuality and fewer barriers to the provision of sexual healthcare. Previous scores on the SABS have been reported as ranging from a low of 30.62 as part of an experimental study that revealed scores drop to the 22 and 23 range following sexuality education [ 14 ] to highs of 44.36 among Jordanian nurses [ 16 ] and 47.72 [ 17 ] among Chinese nurses and many scores between [ 15 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ].…”