Abstract
The analysis of open-minded attitudes towards sexuality in general requires a construct based on attitudinal dimensions. Although several existing studies involve sexual attitudes, they differ substantially and standardized conceptual work is missing. Thus, the authors introduce the latent variable sexual openness to develop a construct based on self-oriented attitudes towards different sexual topics. Available survey data of female German students in a steady relationship allowed providing a first empirical test for the applicability of this construct. Five subdimensions are acknowledged central for sexual openness: sexual practices, masturbation, bisexuality, permissiveness, and pornography consumption. Confirmatory factor analysis and correlations confirmed the idea of an underlying mechanism with an impact on all five variables. Though further validation of the construct of sexual openness is required, the findings strongly support the notion of an overarching latent attitude variable, which influences the individual relation to everything sexual. The results were compared to other studies and potential approaches for future analyses were proposed.
Highlights
Sexual well-being is known to have positive effects on mental health, self-confidence, quality of partnership, and body image [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Goodness-of-fit indices calculated for ML and MLMV resulted in similar outcomes like those for asymptotically distribution free (ADF)
In the following we will refer to the results of ADF estimation as it is suggested for non-normality and our sample size complies with the requirements [70, 79, 80]
Summary
Sexual well-being is known to have positive effects on mental health, self-confidence, quality of partnership, and body image [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Sexual dysfunction is associated with a reduced quality of life. This is due to the impact on depression, anxiety, and distressed feelings [7,8,9]. An increased level of sexual well-being is connected to open attitudes towards sexuality [10,11,12]. These attitudes are influenced by the complexity of personal experience, as well as the cultural and social environment [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. Because of its apparent impact on the quality of life we introduce the construct sexual openness for systematic research and model development of sexual functioning
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