Attitudes towards school-based affective and sexual educational (ASASE) programmes scale: preliminary validation and psychometric properties

Affective and sexual education contribute significantly to the development of the social and emotional skills necessary to raise aware and empathetic adults. Attitudes towards these programmes play a crucial role in their acceptance and are essential to their successful promotion and implementation. Therefore, this research developed and preliminarily tested a scale to assess attitudes regarding school-based affective and sexual education programmes. Through three data collections in 2025, the instrument’s structure, internal reliability, measurement invariance, nomological and convergent validity were tested. Exploratory factor analysis (Study 1, N = 474) and confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2, N = 1261) showed a two-factor structure of the scale as well as its excellent fit, internal reliability, and measurement invariance across participants’ gender and age. Finally, Study 3 (N = 719) investigated the measure’s nomological and convergent validity and pointed out significant associations between a similar measure of parental attitudes towards sexual education for children, participants’ religiosity and right-wing political orientation. The results showed that the scale is a versatile instrument with excellent psychometric properties. The scale can help provide insight to schools, policymakers, and public health organisations in designing and evaluating initiatives concerning school-based affective and sexual educational programmes.