Date

5-2019

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Counselor Education and Supervision (PhD)

Chair

Fred Volk

Keywords

Sexual Shame, Shame, Sexuality, Pornography Use, Relational Attachment, Religiosity

Disciplines

Counseling | Counselor Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

There has been an increase in a need to provide appropriate assessments and treatments for sexual shame associated with pornography use, a dysfunctional result of the development of the Internet and social network services. There is no clinically validated inventory of sexual shame in the literature, while many active studies of shame have recently produced meaningful results. This study aimed to develop a brief measure of sexual shame based on the Kyle Inventory of Sexual Shame (KISS) that has not truly been validated with multiple samples. The KISS is comprised of some items confound cause and effect rather than assess the conceptually distinct feelings of sexual shame irrespective of cause. For developing the refined sexual shame inventory, this study removed questions regarding cause and effect from the original KISS in expectation that counselors and researchers on sexual shame will understand the factors that may moderate the relationship between a specific potential cause of shame and feelings of sexual shame. The first study used exploratory factor analysis to refine the initial battery of 20 items of the KISS. By using Maximum Likelihood Extraction with Oblique Rotation, the KISS-9 was developed. Results show that there is a significant correlation between anxiety, pornography use, and sexual shame, while a relationship between avoidance, pornography use, and sexual shame is not significant.

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