The Same Yet Different: Refocusing the Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST) to Reflect Orientation and Gender

Abstract

In 1988, the Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST) was described as an early assessment tool for clinicians to use with patients who manifested sexually compulsive behavior. Early research acknowledged that while the SAST was very useful with heterosexual males, it did not do well with women or homosexual men. There were subsequent efforts to create instruments with “SAST- like” architecture for women and homosexual men. Called the W-SAST and the G-SAST, these instruments had little research to support their clinical utility. This article describes the development of a new version of the SAST (SAST-R) which is designed to be clinically relevant across populations. Item selection was based on a clinical population of inpatient sex addicts (N = 1604), as well as various contrasting populations. The new instrument has core items that show potential to be viable across gender and orientation. The addition of research scales should help resolve the issues around one instrument serving different populations. Preliminary studies using four separate samples of men, and three separate samples of women, are described which point to further research efforts.