Development of an Instrument to Measure Therapists’ Attitudes toward Client Sexuality

Abstract

The Sex Therapists’ Attitudes questionnaire (STAQ) was developed to examine the reactive attitudes of sexual therapists towards the sexuality of their clients, with the purpose of offering a comprehensive instrument that taps therapists’ attitudes regarding their clinical practice and their perceptions and reactions to issues of sexuality expressed and communicated by their clients. The STAQ examines the therapist’s personal attitudes on sexual topics such as normative sexuality, sexual identity, trauma or sexual abuse. STAQ contains items that describe a wide variety of sexual situations, from normative sexuality to violent and perverted sexuality encountered in the clinic. Therapists completing this questionnaire are then required to examine their attitudes toward their clients in the clinical situation and rate their degree of agreement with the feelings, emotions and attitudes presented in the STAQ items. The items in the STAQ describe situations where a client presents in the therapy session a sexual issue of concern such as infidelity, sexual dysfunction, sexual abuse, sexual intercourse, masturbation, sexual orientation, and a variety of sexual habits, both normative and deviant. The questionnaire, which was validated by both psychologists and sexual and family therapists in Israel, has very high reliability (= .95).