Development and Validation of The Agonistic Continuum Scale (TACS)

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.