What is the most effective way to measure sexuality? The utilisation of a new method

<p>Investigating sex interest, including deviantpreferences, can be troublesome, mainly because of the methods chosenfor assessment. Self-report and objective measures are invaluable tothis research, however self-report is subject to socially desirableresponding and phallometry is prone to faking and can be invasive(Kalmus & Beech, 2005). Consequently, more reliable and less invasivemethods, commonly termed indirect measures have been developed(Snowden et al., 2011). However, most of these measures are still intheir infancy, difficult to implement in practice, and only provide asingle outcome variable (e.g., response-latency).Thus, in order to amalgamate the positives of the aforementionedmethods, and lessen their limitations, a new tablet PC application(M-TASI; Multimodal Tablet for Assessing Sexual Interest) has beendeveloped for use in an academic capacity, by drawing upon previousresearch (Hofmann et al., 2009; Kraus & Hofmann, 2014). Participants must ‘swipe’ sexually relevant stimuli towards oraway from them in an approach or avoidance procedure, respectively.Approach-avoidance procedures have been deemed viable in sexualityresearch (Hofmann et al., 2009), yet there is no evidence of using atablet-based approach-avoidance paradigm to investigate humansexuality, thus the M-TASI could contribute to filing this dearth inthe literature.A pilot study has been conducted to test the viability of the method,focusing on variables such as ‘swipe speed’, response time andlocation of first touch. These results will be discussed.This research will, hopefully, give credence to using this methodologyin future, and could be applied to deviant sex interest.</p>