Inventory of Sexual Experiences and Response in Disability (IEReSDi): Construction and Validation of the Scale of the Sexual Response in People with Disabilities

Abstract

Mexico has approximately 2300000 people who live with some severe disability. Disability is a health problem that has increased progressively and as such, has serious consequences for the person who experiences it, as well as for the family. The impact of the disability on sexuality is an undeniable aspect that frequently is reported in scientific literature; there is also a general consensus among clinical investigators of diverse countries with respect to the effects as much at the physiological as at the psychological level of sexuality. How these changes affect the Mexican population is unknown, due to the scant amount of research. The intent of the investigation was to construct and validate an inventory that made it possible to know what sexual experiences and response is of disabled men and women in the Mexican Republic. This study was aimed at validating the properties of three scales which specifically identify the experiences that comprise part of the study subjects’ human sexual response; altogether 609 subjects, 464 women (76.2) and 145 men (23.8) between the ages of 14 and 87 (x = 37), 245 unmarried and 364 living as a couple, the frequency of motor disability taking first place (308 subjects = 50.6), followed by mental disability (113 subjects = 18.6) and visual deficits (68 subjects = 11.2). This inventory consists of three areas: (1) sexual satisfaction in disability, (2) sexual response in disability, and (3) factors that interfere with sexuality in disability; the area of sexual response includes scales of desire, arousal and orgasm. The inventory was applied individually and the results were processed through statistical package SPSS, doing analysis of frequencies, t tests, variance, and chi-square test, as well as reliability tests. The results show in all cases, a greater tendency by men with some type of disability to search for and be involved in experiences of an affective and sexual type, which makes one suppose that gender roles have a big influence on sex following disability.