Validation of the Male Social-Sexual Effectiveness Scale
The author (1989) developed the Male Social-Sexual Effectiveness Scale as a means to assess men's perceived effectiveness in dating and sexual relating; however, assessment of validity, beyond the content validity of the scale, is required. Burt (1980) developed scales of Adversarial Sexual Beliefs, Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence, and Rape Myth Acceptance to tap these dimensions of American society's stereotypes regarding relations between women and men. One might expect men with limited skill and confidence when relating with women to ascribe to many of these stereotyped attitudes, i.e., to rely on the myths of society to function somewhat effectively in the social arena, whereas men with greater comfort and confidence should ascribe to fewer such attitudes. From chis one may infer that scores on the Male Social-Sexual Effectiveness Scale should correlate negatively with scores on Burt's three scales. As part of the initial development of the Male Social-Sexual Effectiveness Scale, 90 male college students completed each of the four scales mentioned above. Pearson product-moment correlations indicated significant negative associations between scores on the Male Social-Sexual Effectiveness Scale ( M = 63.22, SD = 12.40) and each of Burt's scales (Adversarial Sexual Beliefs, r = -.26, p < .01, M = 28.19, S D = 7.54; Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence, r = -.22, p < .05, M = 15.96, S D = 5.22; Rape Myth Acceptance, r = -.23, p < .05, M = 42.52, SD = 11.36), supporting the criterion-referenced validity of the newly developed scale of effectiveness. Men scoring higher on the scale tended to believe fewer of the stereotyped myths regarding male-female relations, indicating less acceptance of adversarial sexual beliefs, interpersonal violence, and rape mythology, than men who scored lower on the scale. Note that the obtained correlation values account, at best, for only about 7% of the common variance. Further assessment of validity is needed.