The Sexual Desire Inventory as a measure of sexual motivation in college students

The human sexual response consists of at least two phases of behavior, the motivational phase and the consummatory phase, which are difficult to isola te. Sexual motivation questionnaires commonly contain items that assume sex ual intercourse or partners' experience and are often difficult to use with sexually inexperienced persons. The Sexual Desire Inventory by Spector, Ca rey, and Steinberg does not appear to be confounded with consummatory behav ior. Our goal was to check whether it can be used to measure sexual motivat ion. 40 men and 63 women completed the Sexual Experience Scale of sexual mo tivation by Frenken and Vennix and the Sexual Desire Inventory. Scores on t he two inventories were highly correlated with this measure of sexual motiv ation and may be used with sexually inexperienced individuals.