Coercive Sexual Environments: Development and Validation of a Scale.

In this article, we present the results of our efforts to develop and test a scale to operationalize and measure a neighborhood-level indicator of coercive sexual environments (CSEs), a construct emerging from our earlier work on safety and sexual threats among young girls living in chronically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Data for this study come from a survey of 124 adult and 79 youth respondents living in public housing in Washington, D.C., and participating in the Housing Opportunities and Services Together Demonstration, a multisite project testing the feasibility and effectiveness of place-based, dual-generation case management models to improve outcomes for vulnerable families. Our psychometric analysis indicates that the CSE scales we developed for adults and youth have high internal consistency. Together with our analyses of construct validity, the present findings suggest that CSE is a unitary construct that may be an important factor to include in models of neighborhood processes and risk.