Measuring sexual self-concept: a methodological review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual self-concept (SSC) is a person’s perception of themself as a sexual being. SSC is a key construct in understanding people’s sexuality. However, the extent to which sexuality researchers consistently define, measure, and evaluate SSC is unknown. In this review, we determine the common elements of researchers’ conceptual definitions of SSC (RQ1), describe how researchers measure SSC (RQ2), examine the structural (RQ3) and external (RQ4) validity of these measures, and (highlight who is represented in the creation of SSC measures (RQ5). We conducted a comprehensive review of 67 peer-reviewed SSC studies identified through a systematic search of five databases. We extracted data using Loevinger’s (1957) three phases of construct validation: substantive, structural, and external. Our results highlight current limitations in SSC construct validity. Of the 67 studies, 50 provided a conceptual SSC definition, including 14 unique definitions. Additionally, there were 32 unique measures of SSC, providing 34 distinct subscales. White (38.3%), female (47.8%), and North American (47.8%) participants were mostly represented in the research; sexual minoritized people’s perceptions were underrepresented. We discuss the importance of having consistent theory-driven definitions of SSC. Moreover, researchers must consider how different groups of people uniquely understand and construct their SSCs to improve knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Methods · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | low |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it