Sexual Experiences Survey
The Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) is a self-report instrument developed by Mary P. Koss and Cheryl J. Oros in 1982 to measure sexual aggression and victimization using behaviorally specific items rather than legal or stigmatizing labels. Instead of asking whether someone was 'raped', it asks about concrete acts and the tactics used to obtain them, ordering experiences along a severity continuum from unwanted sexual contact through verbal coercion to attempted and completed rape. It exists in matched victimization (SES-V) and perpetration (SES-P) versions, with widely used revised short forms (SES-SFV and SES-SFP) released after the 2007 collaborative revision.
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Sources
- Koss, M. P., & Oros, C. J. (1982). Sexual Experiences Survey: A research instrument investigating sexual aggression and victimization. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 50(3), 455–457. DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.50.3.455 ↗
- Koss, M. P., Abbey, A., Campbell, R., Cook, S., Norris, J., Testa, M., Ullman, S., West, C., & White, J. (2007). Revising the SES: A collaborative process to improve assessment of sexual aggression and victimization. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31(4), 357–370. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2007.00385.x ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Sexual Experiences Survey (SES). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/gender-studies/sexual-experiences-survey
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