Measuring the Multidimensional Construct of Pornography: A Long and Short Version of the Pornography Usage Measure

Abstract

With the increase in the availability and usage of pornography, the research on the effects of pornography has also increased. This research has uncovered several controversies in the field regarding how pornography usage influences attitudes, sexual behaviors, and relationships. However, many of the measures of pornography are problematic as there is often little reliability and validity information for them and it is not clear that participants in these research studies are referring to the same types of materials when they answer pornography usage questions. Consequently, many of the research findings are suspect and it is crucial to develop reliable and valid scales to measure general pornography usage. In this study, we present both a 20-item and a 7-item version of the Pornography Usage Measure (PUM) that is based on extensive previous research on what types of materials individuals consider pornographic and that indicates pornography is a multidimensional construct. We evaluated the reliability and validity of both versions by using an MTurk sample of 934 males and 705 females (N =1639 total) to conduct confirmatory factor analyses, item response analyses, and structural equation model analyses. These analyses demonstrated that there were adequate reliability and early evidence for content, construct, concurrent, and predictive validity for both versions of the PUM. This measure could improve the quality of future research on pornography by providing more consistency between different studies about what is being measured when individuals indicate their pornography usage patterns.

The Role of Discrepancies Between Online Pornography Created Ideals and Actual Sexual Relationships in Heterosexual Men’s Sexual Satisfaction and Well-Being

“…Although the construct of IASD demonstrated its usefulness in understanding SEIM consumption’s negative outcomes, other constructs such as (the lack of) sexual communication (Kohut et al, 2018), sexual passion (Busby et al, 2020; Leonhardt et al, 2020), or personality (Vaillancourt-Morel et al, 2017) and relationship length (Mallory et al, 2019) may also contribute to the negative association between SEIM consumption and sexual satisfaction. Further, higher pornography consumption may negatively affect one’s sexual satisfaction (and relational satisfaction) when it is perceived as a form of infidelity (Schneider, 2002) or betrayal of boundaries by oneself or one’s partner (Zitzman & Bulter, 2009).…”

“…The SEIM industry markets its content as ideal and desirable. Various genres and themes of pornographic sexual interactions have emerged on contemporary SEIM platforms to captivate users (Busby et al, 2020; Zhou et al, 2019). This surplus of SEIM content may have cultivated a fast-food diet approach, encouraging a type of exploration among younger men that contributes to more rapid or flexible changes in sexual preferences at this early stage of sexual script formation.…”

“…The SEIM industry markets its content as ideal and desirable. Various genres and themes of pornographic sexual interactions have emerged on contemporary SEIM platforms to captivate users (Busby et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2019). This Table 3.…”

Links of Perceived Pornography Realism with Sexual Aggression via Sexual Scripts, Sexual Behavior, and Acceptance of Sexual Coercion: A Study with German University Students

“…A more fine-grained measure of the type of pornography used would enable future research to examine differential associations with sexual aggression perpetration and victimization [ 7 ]. Recent methodological critiques of the field of pornography research have called for greater efforts to create validated measures, which are needed to facilitate a better comparability of findings across future studies [ 73 , 74 ].…”

The Development and Validation of the Pornography Use in Romantic Relationships Scale

“…In response to the lack of multidimensional assessment, two new measures—the Pornography Usage Measure (PUM; Busby et al, 2020 ) and the Consumption of Pornography Scale-General (COPS-G; Hatch et al, 2020 )—have been developed that do take a multidimensional approach to the assessment of pornography, and in doing so, warrant further discussion. Although these newly developed measures improve on past measures of pornography use, they ultimately fall short of addressing a number of the limitations in the conceptualization and measurement of pornography use noted as part of recent reviews of the field (Kohut et al, 2019 ; Marshall & Miller, 2019 ; Short et al, 2012 ).…”