Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30 (2006), 139–149. Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Printed in the USA. Copyright C  2006 Division 35, American Psychological Association. 0361-6843/06 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SEXUAL SELF-CONCEPT INVENTORY FOR EARLY ADOLESCENT GIRLS Lucia F. O’Sullivan Albert Einstein College of Medicine Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg New York State Psychiatric Institute Ian W. McKeague Columbia University The Sexual Self-Concept Inventory (SSCI) was developed to assess sexual self-concept in an ethnically diverse sample of urban early adolescent girls. Three scales (Sexual Arousability, Sexual Agency, and Negative Sexual Affect) were shown to be distinct and reliable dimensions of girls’ sexual self-concepts. Validity was established through comparisons with established instruments. Sexual Arousability and Sexual Agency were associated with positive sexual self- esteem, positive future orientation toward sex, intentions to engage in intercourse, and lower levels of sexual experience. Negative Sexual Affect was associated with stronger abstinence attitudes and lack of intentions or orientation toward sex in the near future. The results indicate that the SSCI constitutes a valid means of assessing early adolescent girls’ views of their sexuality and sexual behavior and may be of use in studies of health and risk-related decision making. To understand adolescent sexual behavior, it is important to examine how adolescents construct a sense of them- selves as sexual people. Most research on adolescent sex- uality has focused on problem behavior outcomes, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection among mid- dle or late adolescent girls (Niccolai et al., 2004), resulting in a narrow perspective regarding the sexual lives of adoles- cents. This truncated view is particularly true of non-White adolescents who are often excluded from normative de- velopmental analyses of sexuality, though not from studies of poor health and social outcomes related to sexual be- Lucia F. O’Sullivan, Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Heino F. L. Meyer- Bahlburg, Department of Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute; Ian W. McKeague, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. This research was supported by NIMH Grant K01-MH01689 (Principal Investigator: Lucia F. O’Sullivan) while the first au- thor was a faculty member at Columbia University and NIMH P50-MH43520 (HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies; Center Principal Investigator: Anke A. Ehrhardt). We thank the participants in the study and Giovanna Rodriguez, Cheryl Dudley, Kimberly Hearn, Yvonne Varela, Keisha Miller, Beth Farber, Jennifer Kornreich, Johanna Landinez, Leah D’Agostino, Megan McCrudden, and Anne Uba for their help with data collection. We also thank the members of the Inter- disciplinary Research Methods Core at the HIV Center for their consultation on the development of the methods. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Lucia F. O’Sullivan, Ph.D., Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Mazer 100, New York, NY 10461. E-mail: losulliv@aecom.yu.edu havior (Tolman, Striepe, & O’Sullivan, 2003; O’Sullivan & Brooks-Gunn, 2005). Researchers have recently been chal- lenged to take a broader perspective of sexual development (Bancroft, 2003) and to characterize the array of normative physical, psychological, and social changes that are funda- mental to a developing sense of self. Developmental Features of Relevance to Assessment There are important changes in the lives of early adoles- cents pertinent to the assessment of sexual self-concept. Most notably, early adolescents begin to experience the dramatic physical changes of puberty, to become aware of sexual drive and erotic feelings, and to develop previ- ously unfamiliar views of themselves as individuals capa- ble of eliciting sexual interest in others. At this time, peers gain considerable social influence and frequently provide social contexts for early romantic and sexual encounters (O’Sullivan, 2005; O’Sullivan, Meyer-Bahlburg, & Watkins, 2000, 2001). Although most young people experience first intercourse during the middle to late adolescent years (i.e., 15 to 21 years), there is considerable sexual experience that precedes first intercourse but is often overlooked. Indeed, early adolescents (i.e., 12 to 14 years) are often considered to be sexually “nonactive” despite a range of “precoital” sexual experiences involving ever-increasing levels of exploration. In addition, early adolescence is a time when a primary de- velopmental task is to integrate into a sense of self or iden- tity those experiences associated with movement away from childhood (Erikson, 1950). Interpersonal attributes and so- cial skills, as well as a particular sensitivity to social compar- ison information, are salient features of the psychology of 139