Creating a Test for a Psychological Construct is No Easy Task
For my test project, I created a test for the psychological construct sexual orientation. Just as most things are, it was easier said than done. Throughout the process, I encountered many problems some previously established tests for the same psychological construct had, and even more problems when trying to fix the flaws of those tests in an attempt to design my own.
One of the problems that came up was that many people don’t understand how sexuality is fluid. Just because one’s sexual orientation changed from the past few years, it doesn’t mean their sexual orientation in those past few years should be discredited or regarded as a phase, since it stemmed from their own feelings and only they know themselves the best.
There are certain countries in this world where homosexuality is regarded as a sin and people could put their lives in danger if they came out as anything but straight. This could really fluctuate the results of the testing. Since nowadays, homosexuality is more accepted compared to 50 years ago and many countries have now legalized same-sex marriage, people are more willing to come out. This created the illusion that some people believe to be true: a larger percentage of the human race has “become” non-heterosexual, due to various sources of environmental influence such as the media and the government.
Most of the well-known historical tests for this construct simply are just outdated, such as the famous Kinsey Scale.
Often times, they only consider homosexuality and heterosexuality to exist, not asexuality nor even simply bisexuality. Also, the types of sexual orientation identities only fit with the genders male and female. What about people who are intersex? The fact that intersex individuals usually have part of their genitals cut off and categorized as male or female truly boggles me. Even when it is a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be seen with naked eyes, we still try to correct it is absolutely absurd. Only considering heterosexuality and homosexuality simply wouldn’t go well with intersex individuals, and on top of that, those who identify as genderqueer.
Luckily, someone came up with the idea of using androsexuality and gynesexuality, which I implemented in my test. Androsexuality means having sexual attraction towards males and/or masculinity, while gynesexuality indicates sexual attraction towards females and/or femininity. This is a great alternative to the old school terms heterosexuality and homosexuality, since you can never know someone’s actual gender identity unless if you explicitly ask, and you don’t have to know one’s gender identity to be sexually attracted to them.
Some of the tests look very heavily upon sexual behavior. Some individuals may have a very heterosexual history of sexual behavior due to the dangers of being out and being deviant from the rest of their community. Therefore, sexual behavior shouldn’t be a major determinate for one’s sexual orientation identity.
Truthfully, all of the questions don’t matter as much as the self-identification of sexual orientation, since no one would know an individual as well as they know themselves. All the other questions are just to prevent someone from identifying as something completely absurd, such as an alpaca, simply just to mess with the test results.
Regardless of all the alterations of the previous tests I made to adapt them to my own test, surely there is room for improvement. Who knows? Maybe in a few years the definition for alpaca would completely change and could be applied to humans.
