TY - JOUR
T1 - Development and Validation of The Agonistic Continuum Scale (TACS)
AU - LONGPRE, NICHOLAS
AU - Knight, Raymond A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
PY - 2025/10/17
Y1 - 2025/10/17
N2 - Sexual violence includes a wide variety of behaviours, ranging from harassment, to coercion, to rape, to sexual homicide. Although the Criminal Justice system distinguishes these forms of sexual violence, several studies have suggested that they represent different degrees of severity of an underlying continuum, named the Agonistic Continuum. Such model proposes that sub-categories of sexual violence share a core, unifying construct. The aim of the present study was to develop and test the psychometric properties of a new Agonistic scale. Classical test theory, exploratory factor analyses, taxometric analyses, and two-parameter item response theory analyses were conducted on a combined sample of MTurk workers and university students. Analyses revealed that the new 30-item Agonistic scale is psychometrically sound. These results have several implications, ranging from moving away from the arbitrary categorization of sexual violence, to encompassing the last decade of research on harassment and coercion following the #MeToo movement.
AB - Sexual violence includes a wide variety of behaviours, ranging from harassment, to coercion, to rape, to sexual homicide. Although the Criminal Justice system distinguishes these forms of sexual violence, several studies have suggested that they represent different degrees of severity of an underlying continuum, named the Agonistic Continuum. Such model proposes that sub-categories of sexual violence share a core, unifying construct. The aim of the present study was to develop and test the psychometric properties of a new Agonistic scale. Classical test theory, exploratory factor analyses, taxometric analyses, and two-parameter item response theory analyses were conducted on a combined sample of MTurk workers and university students. Analyses revealed that the new 30-item Agonistic scale is psychometrically sound. These results have several implications, ranging from moving away from the arbitrary categorization of sexual violence, to encompassing the last decade of research on harassment and coercion following the #MeToo movement.
KW - Agonistic Continuum
KW - Paraphilic Coercive Disorder
KW - Sexual Sadism
KW - Dimensional Assessment
KW - Item Response Theory
KW - paraphilic coercive disorder
KW - dimensional assessment
KW - sexual sadism
U2 - 10.1177/10731911251382063
DO - 10.1177/10731911251382063
M3 - Article (journal)
SN - 1073-1911
SP - 1
EP - 13
JO - Assessment
JF - Assessment
M1 - 10731911251382063
ER -
