Measuring women's satisfaction with treatment for sexual dysfunction: development and initial validation of the Women's Inventory of Treatment Satisfaction (WITS-9).

AIM

To develop a brief, psychometrically sound, measure of satisfaction with treatment for female sexual arousal disorder.

METHOD

In Phase 1, women in focus groups generated items measuring satisfaction with treatment for arousal disorder. In Phase 2, expert clinicians/researchers and women with self-reported female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD) assessed the content validity of the items. In Phase 3, women enrolled in a double-blind treatment trial for female sexual dysfunction completed the Women's Inventory of Treatment Satisfaction (WITS) and the Female Sexual Function Inventory (FSFI) to provide reliability and validity information.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

WITS and FSFI.

RESULTS

In Phase 2, 36 items demonstrated adequate content validity. In Phase 3, 20 items correlated with symptom improvement on the FSFI arousal subscale. Factor analysis sorted these items into three dimensions: initiation/receptivity satisfaction, treatment satisfaction, and perceived partner satisfaction. The three items with the highest loadings on each factor formed the WITS-9. Internal consistency (α) reliability coefficients for the total WITS-9 score and the three subscale scores were 0.92, 0.93, 0.92, and 0.79, respectively. Correlations of WITS-9 scores with the FSFI change scores for subgroups with different sexual dysfunctions offer construct validity support that the WITS-9 measures treatment satisfaction for women with a variety of sexual dysfunctions.

CONCLUSION

The WITS-9 is a brief, psychometrically sound scale that is useful for assessing treatment satisfaction in women with sexual dysfunctions. While the WITS-9 is promising, further work needs to be done to obtain reliability and validity information in additional samples.