A Preliminary Exploratory Factor Analysis of the BDSM Counselor Competency Scale

BDSM practitioners represent a large sexual minority group often overlooked, misunderstood, and unnecessarily pathologized by mental health clinicians. Although developing cultural competence for diverse and marginalized populations is widely understood to be a core component of delivering efficacious therapeutic services that can counteract these stigmatizing mental healthcare experiences, no measures currently exist that assess clinicians’ self-reported competence to work with BDSM practitioners. Previous measurement work has been done to establish self-report competency scales for clinicians working with other sexual and gender minority groups, but no such scales exist for working with BDSM practitioners. In the current study, we adapted a version of the Sexual Orientation Counselor Competency Scale (SOCCS) to measure clinicians’ self-reported competence to work with BDSM practitioners and did a preliminary exploratory factor analysis of the new scale (n = 124). After an initial 24-item administration, principal axis factoring of our final 17-item solution revealed two latent factors (attitudes and skills/knowledge) consistent with the 2013 SOCCS and the theoretical constructs of cultural competency. The BDSM Counselor Competency Scale (BDSM-CCS) can help clinicians, practices, agencies, and training programs track self-reported cultural competence with the BDSM population. Future research directions for scale development and clinical and training applications are discussed.