Assessing Sexual Function and Dyspareunia with the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) in Women with Vulvodynia

TLDR

The Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) is a validated multidimensional self‑report instrument for assessing female sexual function, originally developed by Rosen et al. in 2000. The study evaluated 42 women with vulvodynia using the FSFI. The FSFI demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α 0.90–0.97) and, compared with healthy and other patient samples, revealed large effect sizes (1.15–2.83) indicating markedly poorer sexual function and greater dyspareunia in women with vulvodynia, supporting its discriminant validity.

Abstract

Using the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI; Rosen et al., 2000 Rosen, R., Brown, C., Heiman, J., Leiblum, S., Meston, C., Shabsigh, R., Ferguson, D. and D'Agostino, R. 2000. The female sexual function index (FSFI): A multidimensional self-report instrument for the assessment of female sexual function. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 26: 191–208. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we assessed forty-two women with vulvodynia. Internal consistency was high (Cronbach's alphas = 0.90–0.97) for all scales. We compared scale scores to published healthy and patient sample data and found very large effect sizes (1.15–2.83), which indicated that women with vulvodynia reported significantly worse overall sexual function than women without sexual dysfunction and greater pain with sexual intercourse than women with female sexual arousal disorder. Results highlight difficulties experienced across all domains of sexual function, particularly with regard to dyspareunia, for women with vulvodynia. Findings also support the internal consistency and discriminant validity of the FSFI.