Abstract
Social touch is essential in relationships and well-being, but the unique personal experience of touch is not assessed and taken into account in health and social care services. The pleasantness of gentle stroking is influenced by gender, toucher genre, toucher familiarity, culture, and age. Moreover, pleasantness is influenced by touch avoidance, the attitude toward interpersonal touch. The aim of this article is to present the translation, adaptation, and validation in Italian of two scales to measure touch avoidance. For translation and validation, we selected the most used scale, the Touch Avoidance Measure (TAM) and a more recent scale, the Touch Avoidance Questionnaire (TAQ). Confirmatory factor analyses reported good model fit for the TAM [comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.947, Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.940, root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.065] and excellent model fit for the TAQ (CFI = 0.954, TLI = 0.950, RMSEA = 0.058). Internal consistency was high for all subscales, except the TAQ “Stranger” subscale. One-month test–retest reliability ranged from 0.67 to 0.90 for each subscale. Lastly, convergent validity between the TAM and TAQ was also found to be high. We conclude that the TAM and TAQ can be used to assess touch avoidance with Italian samples. The instrument can be used to support healthcare professionals and to assess attitudes toward touch in individuals with interpersonal difficulties.
Highlights
Touch is one of the most important senses for survival: it is one of the first to develop in the maternal womb and the most developed at birth (Hertenstein et al, 2006)
We tested the models conceptualized for their respective original versions, i.e., a two-factor model for the Touch Avoidance Measure (TAM) and a five-factor model for the Touch Avoidance Questionnaire (TAQ)
When considering the trade-off implicated in improving goodness of fit by editing the model, making comparisons with studies employing the English version of the TAM impossible, we deemed it better to err on the side of preserving the original model
Summary
Touch is one of the most important senses for survival: it is one of the first to develop in the maternal womb and the most developed at birth (Hertenstein et al, 2006). Touch in the two last decades has been recognized for its important social function, to the point of calling the skin a “social organ” (Morrison et al, 2010). This highlights the importance of one characteristic of the sense of touch: its pleasantness. Pleasantness of touch has been explained through the social touch hypothesis (Olausson et al, 2010) a theory that explains that slow gentle stroking is pleasant because it is important in close affiliative interactions
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