Gaining comprehensive data about sexual knowledge through surveys

Iranian sexology researchers have emphasized the need for highquality scientific data on the dimensions of sexuality among adults, particularly withcultural considerations. Best practice and the delivery of sexual health services relyon rigorous facts extracted from surveys, but often those facts cannot be availabledue to the lack of culturally-sensitive questionnaires.

The aim of this study was to show the validity and reliability of thePersian version of the Acquisition of Sexual Information Test (ASIT), a measureselected due to its assemblages with Iranian culture.

Forward-backward procedure was applied to translate the50 items-Acquisition of Sexual Information Test from English into Persian. Afterlinguistic validation, a cross-sectional study was carried out and psychometricproperties of the Iranian version of five-dimension questionnaire were tested in athirty sample of reproductive-age, married, healthy and sexually active women. Facevalidity was assessed by qualitative and quantitative methods. Content validity wasalso assessed by calculating two quantitative indicators as content validity index(CVI) and content validity ratio (CVR). In the qualitative phase, experts assessed thequestionnaire from aspects such as wording, grammar, item allocation, and scaling.Reliability was assessed by test-retest analyses.

Impact score was 1.5 in all questions. , the majority of participants (83.3%)stated that the overall level of content qualitative validity of the questionnaire for thetarget population was high but some of the questions were irrelevant to sexualknowledge such as questions in regard to sexual self-concept and human evolution.Many questions (90%) gained a CVR less than 0.56, and all of them gained CVIslower than 0.7. Correlation in test-retest reliability was 0.85 that was considered tobe acceptable.

Regardless of our initial assumptions about selecting the Acquisition ofSexual Information Test, the Persian version of sexual knowledge questionnaireseems to be culturally inappropriate for Iranian women. Although, we need surveydata for assessing the evidence-based needs for sexual health and best practice, butthe questions addressing various dimensions of sexuality such as knowledge must beculturally sensitive, comprehensive and appropriate. Our findings suggest that ASITas a well-known measure should be used in Iranian population with caution. It mustbe re-validated in different adult populations than that we selected in this study.