TPC Journal-Vol 9- Issue 4-FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 4 401 demographics document, participants completed either the APPS or the ATTS. Once the appropriate scale was completed, all participants completed the IRMAS-SF, the EAI, and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC-SDS) - FormA. Attitudes Toward Prostitutes and Prostitution Scale (APPS). The APPS (Levin & Peled, 2011) is a 29-item instrument that uses a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ( fully disagree ) to 5 ( fully agree ) and measures the degree to which participants agree with statements about prostitutes and prostitution. Specifically, the APPS measures Sexual Domination Discourse (SDD; Outshoorn, 2005) attitude, which views prostitution as a form of oppression (Barry, 1979). Individuals with high SDD attitudes believe women do not choose to engage in prostitution and are instead forced to participate in the sex industry as the result of early traumatic experiences (Hunt, 2013; Outshoorn, 2005). The theoretical background for the APPS emerged after an analysis of the existing literature found that views about prostitutes and prostitution could be roughly divided into normative and problem-oriented attitudes (Levin & Peled, 2011). According to Levin and Peled (2011), the normative attitude refers to the belief that prostitutes and prostitution are inherent and functional aspects of a normative society in which commercial sex work is an independent choice. Conversely, the problem-oriented attitude refers to the belief that prostitutes and prostitution are socially deviant in nature (Levin & Peled, 2011). Responses about prostitutes and prostitution are measured on two axes (“normative/deviant” and “choosing/victimized”) that can be further categorized into four subscales (Levin & Peled, 2011). Two subscales assess the participants’ perception of prostitutes as people. Scores on the Prostitutes as Choosing/Victimized (PSCV) subscale measure whether respondents believe prostitutes choose to engage in prostitution (“Prostitutes enjoy the controlling of men”) or are victimized into the act of prostitution (“Prostitutes are unable to get out of the situation they are in”). The PSCV subscale has seven items. The Prostitutes as Normative/Deviant (PSND) subscale measures the extent to which respondents believe prostitutes, as people, are either normative (“Women become prostitutes because they were not properly educated”) or deviant (“Most prostitutes are drug addicts”). The PSND subscale has eight items. Two additional subscales measure the act of prostitution itself. The Prostitution as Normative/ Deviant (PNND) subscale measures whether respondents perceive the act of prostitution to represent either social normativeness (“Prostitution provides men with stress relief”) or social deviance (“Prostitution harms the institution of marriage”). The PNND subscale has seven items. Finally, the Prostitution as Choosing/ Victimized (PNCV) subscale measures whether respondents perceive prostitution represents either women’s choice (“Prostitution is a way for some women to gain power and control”) or the victimization of women (“Prostitution is a form of rape in which the victim gets paid”). The PNCV has seven items (Levin & Peled, 2011). Higher scores on the APPS reflect stronger adherence to the SDD attitude, which asserts that women engaged in sex work do not choose prostitution out of their own free will and prostitution is a deviant act that victimizes women (Farley et al., 2003; Hunt, 2013). The APPS demonstrates sound psychometric properties for the measurement as a whole, across measures both about prostitutes and prostitution, and across all four subscales. The instrument was developed over two pilot studies using 392 male and female undergraduate and graduate students. As reported by Levin and Peled (2011), Cronbach’s alpha rendered an internal consistency for the entire scale ( α = .81), on both subscales ( α = .73; α = .73), and across all four subscales ( α = .88; α = .81; α = .86; α = .83). The results of these analyses suggest satisfactory construct validity for a two- and four-dimensional model of the APPS (Levin & Peled, 2011). The APPS provides an overall score of attitudes about prostitutes and prostitution, scores related to attitudes about prostitutes and prostitution, and scores within each of the four subscales.