Validity and Reliability of Sexual Behavior of Infertile Women Questionnaire: Investigating the Development and Psychometric Properties

Abstract

Objectives: Sexual behavior is considered an important aspect of marital life and is influenced by attitudes, experiences, actions, feelings, and thoughts. The present study aimed to develop a valid and reliable questionnaire to evaluate several aspects of sexual behavior of infertile women (SBIW). Materials and Methods: The current mixed sequential exploratory study was performed in two phases. In the qualitative phase, a preliminary questionnaire was developed based on in-depth interviews with 15 childless women and 8 specialists who were selected by purposeful sampling technique. In addition, qualitative and quantitative SBIW questionnaire was measured by internal consistency and test-retest. Results: In the qualitative phase, a primary questionnaire including 113 items was constructed. Finally, the items of the questionnaire were reduced from 113 to 77 items. The SBIW questionnaire was classified into 5 categories investigating the effects of infertility diagnosis, infertility treatment, common beliefs, sexual response cycle and related factors, and the women’s husbands, relatives, family, community, and education on sexual behavior of these infertile women Further, each investigator could use each part he wished to. S-CVI (sum of content validity index) and S-CVR (sum of content validity ratio) were obtained as 0.86 and 0.68, respectively. Eventually, the Cronbach α = 0.862 and the ICC (intraclass correlation) was obtained 0.928 for the SBIW. Conclusions: In general, it was identified that the SBIW is a valid and reliable instrument which can be used to assess several dimensions of SBIW and is probably considered a useful instrument during infertility consulting and investigations.