The SHI Inventory

     I had to find some means for quickly and accurately assessing each
potential respondent with respect to criterion #4. Each non-shy respond-
ent had to consider himself happily self-confident and relaxed in infor-
mal social interactions vis-a-vis the opposite sex. A substantial minority
of the seemingly non-shy men who contacted me appeared to be pri-
marily interested in earning a quick $10, and in assuaging their curiosity
about the nature of the research. Thus inappropriate individuals had to
be screened out.
     Towards this end I used an instrument devised during the early
1970s by psychologists Craig Twentyman and Richard McFall. This
instrument is known as the Survey of Heterosexual Interactions, or "SHI
Inventory". Up to now the SHI remains the only diagnostic device for
assessing the extent of love-shyness in males which has the advantage
of national norms. Thus the SHI Inventory is now a standardized test
with national norms which are based upon the scores of over 10,000
young men from all over the United States.
     The SHI Inventory is composed of just twenty brief questions. Each
of the twenty items presents a scenario involving the making of a friendly,
assertive move vis-a-vis an attractive person of the opposite sex. For
each of the twenty scenarios the young man taking the test simply
indicates on a seven point scale just how shy or non-shy he would be
about making a friendly/assertive move vis-a-vis the girl described in
the scenario. Scores on this instrument can range from a maximum of
140 (the non-shy end) to a minimum low of 20 (the extremely love-shy
end).
     The mean or average score for normally self-confident American
college and university men is 103.9. (The SHI Inventory can only be
taken by males.) I decided to establish the score of 105 as the minimum
required for acceptance into the non-shy sample. Thus the score of 105
is more than a point higher than the self-confident non-shy norm estab-
lished by Twentyman and McFall.
     The mean or average SHI Inventory scores for each of the three
groups of men studied for this book were as follows:

Self-Confident Non-Shy Men:                                                  114.3
Young (University) Love-Shy Men:                                            47.8
Older Love-Shy Men                                                                   38.6
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Mean for Healthy College Males:                             103.9

      The SHI Inventory is an outstanding diagnostic device. And because
I am often asked about its content, for the convenience of interested
readers I have provided the twenty scenarios it contains in Appendix I
at the end of this book.