Assessing sexual health literacy: a systematic review of measures

Sexual health literacy refers to the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform decisions and actions related to sexual health. Given the importance of sexual health literacy for improving health outcomes, it is prudent to identify sexual health literacy measures that can be used by healthcare providers, scholars and educators. To address this need, we used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses to conduct a systematic review. This review examined 12 databases to identify existing sexual health literacy self-report scales, subscales or individual items that were available in English, developed for scale validation purposes, and published between 2002, the year the World Health Organization convened experts to provide a clear working definition of sexual health, and 2022. We conducted a risk of bias and quality assurance assessment of the nine articles that met inclusion criteria, and coded articles along the ten components of a sexual health model used as the theoretical framework. Findings revealed mixed quality of identified measures. None of the measures received positive ratings on all eight criteria assessed or addressed all components of the sexual health model. The results from this systematic review suggest the need for a culturally sensitive, valid and reliable scale to assess sexual health literacy that can be used by sexual health professionals to promote sexual health and to reduce deleterious sexual health outcomes.