Sexual Experiences Survey

Because that question depends on the respondent applying a legal and stigmatized label to their own experience, which many will not do even when the act meets the definition. Survivors may not name an experience as rape, may not realize coercion counts, or may refuse the label out of shame. The SES sidesteps this by asking about concrete acts and tactics and letting the researcher classify severity, which is why it consistently uncovers far higher and more accurate prevalence than a single labeled question.

A panel led by Koss revised the items to be more behaviorally precise, more clearly gender-neutral, and better organized along the act-by-tactic structure, resolving scoring ambiguities in the original. The collaborative process produced matched short forms — SES-SFV for victimization and SES-SFP for perpetration — that use parallel wording so the two sides can be compared. These short forms are now the standard versions used in most contemporary research.

Each respondent is classified by the most severe act they endorse over the reference period, into mutually exclusive categories from unwanted contact through completed rape. Prevalence is then the proportion of respondents who report at least one act at or above a chosen severity threshold. Because classification uses the single highest-severity endorsement rather than a sum of items, the categories do not overlap and can be reported cleanly by severity, gender, and version.