Clarke Sex History Questionnaire

The Clarke Sex History Questionnaire (Clarke SHQ) is a 225-item assessment of a person's sexual history. It consists of 23 scales, dealing with topics such as child sexual abuse, adolescent sexual abuse, and child and adolescent sexual experience (see child sexuality and adolescent sexuality), child identification, fantasy activities with females and males, exposure to pornography, transvestism, fetishism, gender identity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, obscene phone calls, toucheurism or frotteurism, and sexual aggression. Like interviews, the questionnaire is potentially vulnerable to self-report biases. Although it contains a validity scale, the ability of that scale to detect lying has not been established.

The Clarke SHQ is frequently used in research. Its importance is said to lie largely in two areas: (1) the wide range of sexual behaviors that it assesses, including anomalous behaviors; and (2) the fact that its scales have been reported to be relatively unrelated to age, education, intelligence, defensiveness, and social desirability.

The most common sexual activity reported in the SHQ by a sample of "normal" men was voyeurism (42% of the sample), defined by the SHQ as secretly trying to see a man or woman having sexual relations or women undressing "by looking in windows or other means". Another study using the SHQ found that the number of sex offenders reporting deviant fantasies is too low for fantasy to have etiological significance, and it only has limited utility in diagnosis and treatment in general.

See also

• List of tools used in sex offender forensic psychological evaluations