SOI-R Scoring Explained: How the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory Is Calculated

June 18, 2026 · 3 min read

The Sociosexual Orientation Inventory–Revised (SOI-R) is a 9-item questionnaire developed by Lars Penke and Jens Asendorpf and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2008. It measures sociosexual orientation — how willing and inclined a person is toward casual, uncommitted sex — and it does so across three distinct facets rather than as a single global number. This guide explains exactly how the test is scored.

The three facets

The nine items split evenly into three subscales, each measuring a different component of sociosexuality:

• Behavior (items 1–3) — your actual track record: number of partners in the past year, number of one-time-only partners, and number of partners with whom you had sex without interest in a long-term relationship.
• Attitude (items 4–6) — how you evaluate casual sex: whether sex without love is acceptable, whether you could enjoy casual sex, and (reverse-keyed) whether you need commitment before sex.
• Desire (items 7–9) — the frequency of your sexual fantasies, arousal, and spontaneous desire directed at people you are not in a committed relationship with.

This three-facet structure is the key innovation of the Revised inventory over the original 1991 Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, which collapsed everything into one score.

The response scales

Each item is answered on a 9-point scale, but the anchors differ by facet:

• Behavior items use frequency brackets (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–9, 10–19, 20 or more).
• Attitude items use a 9-point agreement scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree).
• Desire items use a 9-point frequency scale (never to at least once a day).

The reverse-coded item

Item 6 — "I do not want to have sex with a person until I am sure that we will have a long-term, serious relationship" — is reverse-keyed. A person high in sociosexuality disagrees with it, so the raw response is flipped before scoring. On a 9-point scale this means the scored value is 10 − raw response. Forgetting to reverse this single item is the most common scoring mistake.

Calculating facet and total scores

1. Behavior score = the mean of items 1, 2, and 3.
2. Attitude score = the mean of items 4, 5, and 6 (after reverse-coding item 6).
3. Desire score = the mean of items 7, 8, and 9.
4. Total SOI-R score = the mean of all nine items (equivalently, the mean of the three facet scores).

Higher scores indicate a more unrestricted orientation (comfortable with casual sex); lower scores indicate a more restricted orientation (prefers sex within a committed, emotionally close relationship).

What the numbers mean

In the original validation sample, men averaged a higher total than women, and the three facets, while correlated, were distinct enough that a person can be high on one and low on another — for example, unrestricted in desire but restricted in behavior. That is precisely why the SOI-R reports three numbers instead of one label.

To see, question by question, how thousands of people actually answer, visit the sociosexuality statistics page. To get your own confidential breakdown across all three facets, take the SOI-R test.

Reference

Penke, L., & Asendorpf, J. B. (2008). Beyond global sociosexual orientations: A more differentiated look at sociosexuality and its effects on courtship and romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1113–1135.