ABSTRACT
The Child Sexual Abuse Scale (CSAS; Aalsma, Zimet, Fortenberry, Blythe, & Orr, 2002) is a self-report instrument that was developed to measure the occurrence of childhood sexual abuse in adolescent and adult populations. The measurement of childhood sexual abuse varies widely from brief, single-item measures to lengthy clinical interviews. Many measures of childhood sexual abuse are interviews or are lengthy self-report inventories, which are difficult to incorporate into studies assessing many areas of sexual functioning and behavior. This scale was developed with two issues in mind. First, a benefit of the current measure is it is very brief (four items) and can be utilized in a wide variety of studies. Second, because the CSAS is a multiple-item rather than single-item measure, internal reliability can be assessed.
