The Family Life Sex Education Goal Questionnaire II<\/strong> (FLSE-GQ-II) is a comprehensive psychometric needs assessment instrument developed by Steven Godin and Kimberly Razzano to evaluate stakeholder attitudes toward the curriculum goals of family life and sex education<\/a> in public school systems. Originating from the early 1980s Family Life Sex Education Goal Questionnaire (FLSE-GQ) and updated to capture contemporary challenges in adolescent health, the FLSE-GQ-II operationalizes educational priorities across two structural variations: a 60-item Long Form and an empirically distilled 20-item Short Form. Responses are gathered using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Very Unimportant<\/em>) to 5 (Very Important<\/em>). Psychometric investigations across multi-regional samples of educators and parents (comprising cohorts from the American Midwest and Northeast) reveal five primary dimensions: (a) Sexual Decision-Making and Life Skills, (b) Teaching about Male and Female Physical Development, (c) Encouraging Respect for Diversity, (d) Providing Secondary Prevention, and (e) Teaching about the Family and Integrating Sexuality in Personal Growth.<\/p>\n Internal consistency metrics establish solid psychometric stability, with Cronbach\u2019s alpha coefficients for the Long Form ranging from .60 to .79 among teachers and .65 to .85 among parents. The 20-item Short Form demonstrates enhanced internal consistency, yielding alphas between .73 and .83 for teachers and .79 and .87 for parents. Exploratory factor analyses designate Sexual Decision-Making and Life Skills as the principal factor, accounting for roughly 31% to 32% of total variance across diverse parent and regional cohorts. Demographic and sociocultural analyses substantiate criterion and construct validity, indicating that religiosity and race significantly predict variations in stakeholder priorities. As an empirical diagnostic tool, the FLSE-GQ-II bridges community preferences with school board policymaking, mitigating sociopolitical controversy by substituting ideological assumptions with quantifiable consensus data.<\/p>\n Family Life Sex Education Goal Questionnaire II, FLSE-GQ-II, sex education curriculum, needs assessment, sexual health education, adolescent health, psychometrics, parental attitudes, teacher attitudes, factor analysis, public school health policy<\/p>\n The FLSE-GQ-II was developed and validated by:<\/p>\n The original iteration of the instrument (FLSE-GQ) was conceptualized in the early 1980s through collaborative research involving Steven Godin, Susan Frank, Sandra Jacobson, and J. Sugrue.<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Family Life Sex Education Goal Questionnaire II is to provide an empirical, psychometrically validated needs assessment framework for identifying, clarifying, and operationalizing community and educational priorities surrounding comprehensive sexuality education<\/a>. School boards, curriculum developers, district administrators, and public health officials frequently confront complex sociopolitical tensions when designing adolescent sexuality curricula. Historically, educational leadership has exhibited hesitancy in integrating comprehensive sexuality topics\u2014such as contraception, abortion, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV<\/a>) transmission, and sexual orientation\u2014due to perceived community resistance or anticipated backlash from vocal minority factions (Scales, 1983).<\/p>\n The FLSE-GQ-II addresses this governance vulnerability by replacing anecdotal assumptions with systematic data collection. By administering the scale to parents, classroom teachers, school counselors, and administrators, school districts can quantify the degree of support or reservation concerning distinct curricular modules. The instrument clarifies where consensus exists (e.g., broad endorsement of physical development and family communication) and pinpoints content areas where disagreement is localized (e.g., condom demonstration, abortion education, or sexual decision autonomy).<\/p>\n Beyond municipal curriculum design, the FLSE-GQ-II serves valuable clinical and academic research purposes. In health psychology, public health evaluation, and educational sociology, it functions as a diagnostic mechanism to examine how parental and educator attitudes correlate with socio-demographic indicators, such as religiosity<\/a>, educational attainment, ethnicity, and geographic locality. Furthermore, the instrument assists public health researchers in evaluating the congruence between state-mandated educational policies (such as abstinence-only versus comprehensive sexuality models) and authentic grassroots community expectations, thereby facilitating evidence-informed educational reform.<\/p>\n The FLSE-GQ-II measures subjective valuations of educational objectives across family life and sexual health education. Rather than evaluating factual knowledge or personal behavioral tendencies, the underlying construct represents normative educational prioritization<\/em>: the cognitive endorsement of specific concepts, skills, and preventive interventions as vital components of public school socialization. Through extensive psychometric derivation, this construct is partitioned into five distinct dimensions:<\/p>\n This subscale evaluates the degree to which stakeholders prioritize adolescent autonomy, communication efficacy, critical thinking, and pregnancy\/disease risk-reduction strategies. Rather than treating sexuality solely as a biological process, this construct captures the valuation of self-regulation and pragmatic health behaviors. Key instructional targets subsumed under this dimension include counseling adolescents to make independent decisions regarding sexual involvement, equipping youth to identify and resist peer pressures, and familiarizing students with community reproductive health resources, contraception mechanics, and pregnancy resolution options (e.g., Items 8, 10, 17, 18, 21, and 43).<\/p>\n This dimension quantifies the perceived necessity of foundational biological, physiological, and anatomical instruction. It assesses attitudes toward normalizing physical changes during puberty<\/a>, demystifying bodily processes, correcting physiological myths, and fostering positive body image. The construct focuses on promoting holistic somatic comfort and delivering medically accurate anatomical information regarding male and female reproductive systems (e.g., Items 32, 33, and 44).<\/p>\n This factor examines the importance placed on cultural humility, ethical pluralism, tolerance of non-heteronormative sexualities, and the deconstruction of rigid societal gender roles. It captures stakeholder support for teaching how cultural, ethnic, and familial backgrounds shape sexual values, as well as the necessity of addressing structural stereotypes and alternative sexual lifestyles in classroom settings (e.g., Items 47, 48, and 49).<\/p>\n Secondary prevention encompasses targeted, supportive interventions aimed at mitigating the academic, psychosocial, and health consequences experienced by vulnerable, pregnant, or parenting adolescents. This dimension gauges community support for retaining pregnant students in public schools, providing specialized prenatal guidance within educational settings, and supplying school-based crisis counseling for expectant adolescent mothers and fathers (e.g., Items 39, 45, and 57).<\/p>\n This construct evaluates the priority assigned to contextualizing human sexuality within interpersonal relationships, family dynamics, and broader developmental milestones. It reflects traditional and relational paradigms of sex education, emphasizing open intergenerational dialogue between adolescents and parents, constructive intra-familial conflict resolution, moral accountability, and the synthesis of sexual identity within general emotional maturation (e.g., Items 16, 20, 22, 23, and 54).<\/p>\n The theoretical architecture of the FLSE-GQ-II integrates principles from Social Cognitive Theory<\/a> (Bandura, 1986), Ecological Systems Theory<\/a> (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), and contemporary paradigms of public health curriculum design. Rather than conceptualizing health education as a mechanical transmission of biological facts, the instrument assumes that sexuality education is fundamentally an ecological and reciprocal social enterprise.<\/p>\n Bronfenbrenner\u2019s Ecological Systems Theory provides the macro-level justification for the scale. Adolescent sexual health outcomes are shaped not only by individual attributes (the ontogenic level) but through dynamic interactions with microsystems (family, peer networks, school classrooms), the mesosystem (interconnections between parents and educators), and the macrosystem (cultural norms, religious ideologies, and legal frameworks). The FLSE-GQ-II explicitly measures the mesosystemic congruence between the school and the home. When discordant attitudes exist between educators and parents regarding curriculum content, implementation fidelity drops, institutional resistance escalates, and adolescent health messaging becomes fragmented.<\/p>\n Concurrently, Social Cognitive Theory underpins the operationalization of the ‘Sexual Decision-Making and Life Skills’ subscale. Bandura emphasizes that behavior change requires more than knowledge acquisition; it necessitates the development of self-efficacy, observational modeling, anticipatory outcome expectations, and self-regulatory skills. The FLSE-GQ-II captures whether stakeholders value pedagogical methods that build behavioral competencies\u2014such as condom application demonstrations, role-playing refusal techniques against peer pressure, and deliberate boundary-setting\u2014or whether they endorse purely descriptive, knowledge-oriented curricular paradigms.<\/p>\n Finally, the scale\u2019s historical development reflects the evolving paradigm shift within American adolescent health: the empirical movement from restrictive abstinence-only-until-marriage models toward comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). Large-scale meta-analyses and policy reports (Alford, 2003, 2008; Kirby, 2001; Kirby et al., 2005; Waxman Report, 2004; GAO, 2006) established that comprehensive curricula delay coital debut, reduce high-risk sexual practices, and decrease sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and adolescent pregnancies without hastening sexual activity. The FLSE-GQ-II is theoretically constructed to measure the degree to which local stakeholders embrace this public health paradigm versus moral-philosophical restraint models.<\/p>\n Empirical validation of the FLSE-GQ-II rests on robust content, construct, and criterion-related validity assessments conducted across diverse geographic, cultural, and professional cohorts.<\/p>\n Content validity was established through systematic reviews of public school sexuality curricula, adolescent development guidelines, and consultation with health education experts, teachers, school administrators, and community leaders. Iterative revisions from the 1980s FLSE-GQ to the 2006 FLSE-GQ-II ensured the integration of contemporary public health challenges, including modern HIV\/AIDS transmission modes, safer sex negotiations, and emergent adolescent social dynamics.<\/p>\n Construct validity was confirmed via exploratory and principal component analyses on diverse stakeholder cohorts. A benchmark study evaluated 337 elementary and secondary teachers and 248 parents in the Midwest, followed by replication studies involving 175 high school teachers and 157 parents in the rural and suburban Northeast (Razzano & Godin, 2006). These factor analyses consistently reproduced the same five-factor structural architecture across disparate educational contexts, confirming that the underlying conceptual dimensions of the FLSE-GQ-II possess cross-sample stability.<\/p>\n Construct and criterion validity are further substantiated by the scale’s sensitivity to demographic and sociocultural predictors of curriculum attitudes (Frank et al., 1982; Godin et al., 1984). Multiple regression analyses revealed that:<\/p>\n The internal consistency of the FLSE-GQ-II has been documented across multiple validation studies using Cronbach\u2019s alpha<\/a> coefficients, demonstrating acceptable to excellent psychometric reliability across both the 60-item Long Form and the 20-item Short Form.<\/p>\n Across the five extracted goal dimensions on the full-length questionnaire, alpha coefficients demonstrate solid internal consistency:<\/p>\n By retaining only items exhibiting robust factor loadings (\u03bb \u2265 .50) across both parent and educator samples, the 20-item Short Form demonstrates superior internal consistency compared to the full instrument<\/span>:<\/p>\n The absence of unstable or cross-loading items in the Short Form enhances latent construct measurement, making it an efficient option for community surveys where respondent fatigue or varying literacy levels could compromise data quality.<\/p>\n The structural dimensionality of the FLSE-GQ-II was established through Principal Component Analysis<\/a> (PCA) with orthogonal and oblique rotations, administered separately to parent and educator data sets to prevent cross-sample contamination.<\/p>\n Factorial extraction consistently revealed a dominant primary factor accompanied by four distinct secondary factors:<\/p>\n To construct the 20-item Short Form, Godin and Razzano applied a retention criterion requiring an item factor loading of \u03bb \u2265 .50 on its primary dimension across both<\/em> the independent parent and teacher samples. The resulting allocation isolates the most psychometrically robust items<\/span>:<\/p>\n The Family Life Sex Education Goal Questionnaire series holds formal copyrights registered in 1985<\/strong>, 1994<\/strong>, and 2006<\/strong> by Steven Godin and collaborators. The instrument is accessible for non-profit academic research, school district needs assessments, and doctoral dissertations upon contacting the senior author.<\/p>\n Electronic copies of the questionnaire, including an optional standardized demographic questionnaire assessing participant age, gender, race, educational background, and religiosity metrics, can be obtained by contacting: Dr. Steven Godin<\/strong>, Department of Health Studies, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg, PA 18301 (e-mail: sgodin@po-box.esu.edu<\/em>). Commercial deployment, curriculum consulting reproduction, or broad institutional dissemination requires formal written permission.<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Sexual Decision-Making and Life Skills<\/h3>\n
2. Teaching about Male and Female Physical Development<\/h3>\n
3. Encouraging Respect for Diversity<\/h3>\n
4. Providing Secondary Prevention<\/h3>\n
5. Teaching about the Family and Integrating Sexuality in Personal Growth<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Content and Face Validity<\/h3>\n
Construct Validity: Factorial Invariance<\/h3>\n
Criterion and Group-Difference Validity<\/h3>\n
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Reliability<\/h2>\n
Long Form (60 Items) Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Short Form (20 Items) Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Variance Distribution and Latent Architecture<\/h3>\n
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Short-Form Item Selection Criteria<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n