Designing and Validating a New Youth and Adolescent Sexual Knowledge Scale

INTRODUCTION: There is an increasing trend of premarital sexual experience and teenage pregnancies in Malaysia, coupled with a paucity of data regarding sexual practices amongst adolescents. Current available sexual knowledge scales that were reviewed were found unsuitable to be applied to the Malaysian population, due to a multitude of factors such cultural and religious sensitivity; explicit nature and contents; targeting specific populations; non-comprehensiveness. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The development of a new scale, Youth and Adolescent Sexual Knowledge Scale (YASKS) is divided into qualitative and quantitative stages. The qualitative stage involved extensive literature review of currently available and related scales and expert interviews (qualitative content validity) to identify the domains for sexual knowledge; item identification for each domain and language review. In the quantitative stage, the pretest of the pre-final version, and validation study were conducted among students from International Islamic University Malaysia, in Kuantan. RESULTS: Initial Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed 11 factors with overall Cronbach alpha of 0.3, 95% CI (0.251,0.422) EFA was then repeated with two factors resulting in deletion of 19 items. Cronbach alpha significantly improved to 0.695% CI (0.548, 0.643), while the alpha for the two domains were 0.68, CI (0.637, 0.724) and 0.5, 95% CI (0.455,0.589). CONCLUSION: This study revealed a two-factor model with 12 items of the YASKS with acceptable psychometric properties. This scale is valid and reliable to measure sexual knowledge among youth and adolescents in Kuantan.