ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years, sexual quality of life has become of increasing interest to psychologists studying quality of life with ill and/or aging populations. As people are living longer with chronic illnesses, the maintenance of sexual health has become a topic of concern and an essential domain of overall quality of life (QoL; see Arrington, Cofrancesco, & Wu, 2004). This concern has mainly focused on the retention of sexual function after diagnosis and treatment. At the same time, the parameters of the defi nition of sexual function have been dramatically affected by the rapid development of new treatment techniques and pharmaceutical interventions aimed to treat sexual dysfunction. Together, this interest in maintaining patients’ sexual health and testing new sexual function interventions in patient populations has generated a great deal of empirical research in a relatively short period of time. For example, from 1980 to 1989, only 607 articles were published on sexual function, sexual dysfunction, and sexual health. This number grew to 1,428 articles from 1990 to 1999. By the turn of the 21st century, we see this number jump to 5,202 articles published from 2000 to 2009-a nearly ninefold increase over two decades. This emerging body of research has undoubtedly helped to guide clinical interventions and to increase quality of life for patients and their intimate partners. However, questions remain as to whether defi nitions and operationalizations of sexual function commonly used in research settings are suffi cient to describe the range and scope of sexual quality of life (SQoL) experienced by both men and women, especially those who are ill, recovering from illness, or living with a chronic illness.
