Objective  To develop an online partner-seeking sexual behavior attitude scale (OSSA) and to evaluate the validity and reliability of the scale among rural older unmarried men.

  Methods  Literature analysis, in-depth interview, and expert consultation were performed to develop the OSSA. Totally 744 unmarried men aged 28 years and above were recruited among rural populations in 20 central and western provinces and among rural-to-urban migrants in 3 cities in China and surveyed with the OSSA during January – September 2017. Item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability and validity testing were used to verify the reliability and validity of the OSSA.

  Results  The developed OSSA was composed of 10 items in 3 dimensions including risk perception (3 items), functional cognition (3 items), and trust perception (4 items). The cumulative variance contribution of the 3 domains is 63.628% based on exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis resulted in following parameter estimations of the OSSA: 0.975 for goodness of fit index, 0.945 for adjusted goodness of fit index, 0.955 for standard fit index, 0.919 for relative fit index, 0.978 for incremental fit index, 0.977 for comparative fit index, 0.959 for Tucker-Lewis index, 0.530 for reduced norm fit index, and 0.543 for reduced comparison fit index; and the estimations indicated a good fitting of the OSSA′s measurements to the empirical data. The Cronbach′s α coefficient for the whole scale was 0.737 and that for the three dimensions were 0.735, 0.739, and 0.661, respectively, indicating a good reliability of the OSSA. The correlation coefficients between the score of each dimension and that of the whole scale ranged 0.526 – 0.802 (P < 0.01 for all) and the correlation coefficients between the score of each item and its dimension score were between 0.626 – 0.840 (P < 0.01 for all); those coefficients demonstrated that the OSSA is of good construct validity and content validity. Among the participants surveyed with the OSSA, the overall score and dimension scores for risk perception and function cognition differed significantly by sexual behavior and cohabitation experience (P < 0.01 for all); the overall score and dimension score for function cognition varied significantly by age, education, occupation, migration (only for overall score), average monthly income (only for function cognition), and love affair experience (P < 0.01 for all); while, the dimension score for trust perception differed significantly only by education (P < 0.01); the results indicated a good discriminant validity of the OSSA.

  Conclusion  The preliminarily developed online partner-seeking sexual behavior attitude scale is of good reliability and validity and could be applied in the studies on the attitude towards online sexuall partner-seeking among older unmarried men in China.