The Development, Reliability, and Validity of an Inventory for the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression

Abstract

The impetus for developing an inventory that assesses sexual and aggressive thoughts, fantasies, and behaviors evolved from programmatic work on the classification of sexual offenders. To classify rapists in the Massachusetts Treatment Center Rapist Typology, Version 3, detailed information on several dimensions is required, including social competence, expressive aggression, sadism, juvenile and adult general aggression and antisocial behavior, undifferentiated anger, offense planning, and various aspects of sexual behavior and deviance. To supplement the often poorly represented information in archival records and to provide an assessment tool to gather sufficient data to categorize offenders, the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression (MASA) was created. The MASA was administered to 127 sexual offenders, and after a 6-month interval a subsample of 35 offenders repeated the inventory. The preliminary reliability and validity data that are presented support the usefulness of the MASA for assessing the domains necessary for classification.