Reliability and Findings From an Instrument Examining Sexual Assault Disclosure Content and Context: The Sexual Assault Inventory of Disclosure

Abstract

Compared to the depth of research examining the impact of sexual assault disclosure and related responses from others, little is known about the content shared during disclosures. Categorizing survivors as disclosers or nondisclosers disregards the nuanced and complex nature of disclosure. To address this gap, the current studies examined the reliability and preliminary results of the Sexual Assault Inventory of Disclosure (SAID), an inventory of content shared during disclosures and the context in which it was shared. The SAID proved reliable and preliminary findings suggest that perceptions of disclosures as positive or negative are predicted by differences in content and context, above and beyond disclosure recipients' response. The current study also explored gender differences in disclosure. Additional findings, implications, and suggestions for future studies using the SAID are discussed.

Institutional Betrayal: Who Is Most Vulnerable?

“…Given that the SAID is an inventory which represents a tally or sum of endorsement items rather than responses psychometrically related to one another (Clark & Watson, 1995), calculating internal consistency is not appropriate. However, the SAID has demonstrated strong test–retest reliability over a 1-month follow-up, including status of disclosure ( r = 1.00, p < .001) and small to large test–retest correlations for disclosure content ( r = .25 to .70; Pinciotti et al, in press).…”

“…Data were obtained from 1,173 participants recruited for a study of sexual assault disclosure (see Pinciotti et al, in press) from the crowdsourcing website, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk allows workers to search for and complete online studies for pay.…”

“…The Sexual Assault Inventory of Disclosure (SAID; Pinciotti et al, in press) was used to assess participants’ experiences with sexual assault disclosure. The SAID provides detailed information about sexual assault disclosures, including the types and amount of content shared and the context in which disclosures occur.…”

How Women Suffering from Endometriosis Disclose about their Disorder at Work

“…The Disclosure Processes Model (DPM) is used to inform understanding of how individuals disclose stigmatized traits (Chaudoir & Fisher, 2010;Chaudoir et al, 2011), including in studies on disclosure of HIV (Whembolua et al, 2019), mental illness (An & McDermott, 2014;Smith, 2019), sexual assault (Pinciotti et al, 2019), and substance abuse (Earnshaw et al, 2019), among others.…”

#Me(n)Too? Online Social Support Toward Male and Female Survivors of Sexual Victimization

“…This is a characteristic that does not exist in offline environments, in which self-disclosures are usually conducted intimately and therefore the impact of negative responses they involve may be more severe. Given that empirical evidence consistently indicate that negative social reactions are associated with more deleterious effects on disclosers (Pinciotti et al, 2019;Ullman & Relyea, 2016), this response pattern may indicate a unique positive outcome of online disclosure, in which the discloser enjoys a "shield" of supportive respondents who actively oppose unsupportive reactions. This hypothesis needs to be considered cautiously due to the small amount of nonsupportive comments in the current sample and should be further investigated.…”