Development of a 21-item short form of the attitudes to sexual offenders (ATS) scale

Abstract

The Attitudes to Sexual Offenders scale (ATS; Hogue, 1993) is one of the most widely used measurement instruments for assessing views about sexual offenders. The ATS has been used in a variety of contexts, most commonly in comparing forensic professionals and nonprofessionals in relation to their views about this population. This article offers a review of the methods used to examine attitudes toward sexual offenders currently available, before systematically outlining the validation of a 21-item shortened version of the ATS measure (the ATS-21). First, we analyzed the ATS with regards to its underlying factor structure using a general community sample (Study 1; n = 188). This identified three factors: trust, intent, and social distance. We subsequently supported this structure through confirmatory factor analysis in a new community sample (Study 2; n = 335) and Hogue's (1993) original ATS development data (Study 3; n = 170) in order to provide further evidence of its reliability. We also offer preliminary evidence of the ATS-21's test-retest reliability, consistency across multiple testing contexts, resistance to social desirability, and independence from related measures (Study 4; n = 59). We close by recommending the use of the ATS-21 for researchers examining attitudes toward sexual offenders and offer suggestions for a new unified research design to incorporate the ATS-21 into emerging research into the psychological underpinnings of attitudes and responses to sexual offenders. We offer open data at https://osf.io/ymhsw/ and open scoring resources for the ATS-21 at https://osf.io/34hsx/.