Abstract
The Chinese Internalized Binegativity Scale (CIBS) (Wei & Israel, 2023) is an empirically validated psychometric instrument specifically developed to operationalize and assess internalized binegativity (IB) among bisexual individuals across Greater China, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Developed to address the critical absence of culturally grounded assessment tools for bisexual populations in non-Western societies, the CIBS was established through a dual-methodological framework comprising the translation and cultural adaptation of the U.S.-developed Bisexual Identity Inventory (Paul et al., 2014) alongside rigorous qualitative inquiry. This qualitative phase integrated feedback from expert panels and in-depth interviews with bisexual laypersons across the three Chinese cultural regions, yielding novel culturally specific items. The finalized instrument comprises 25 items structured across six distinct dimensions: Illegitimacy, Monosexism, Aversion, Irresponsibility, Family Shame, and Identity Affirmation. All items are rated on a 7-point response scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) affirmed an exceptional fit for the six-factor model (χ² = 397.458, df = 260, CFI = .95, TLI = .95, RMSEA = .039, SRMR = .06), while an alternative bifactor specification confirmed the viability of a general internalized binegativity dimension. The CIBS exhibits robust psychometric reliability, with subscale Cronbach’s α coefficients spanning .76 to .91, McDonald’s ω values between .85 and .91, and factor determinacy coefficients ranging from .92 to .97. Evidence of convergent validity is demonstrated via significant associations with internalized homophobia and private collective self-esteem, whereas predictive validity is established through significant correlations with outness and depressive symptomatology. The CIBS provides clinicians and researchers with an essential, culturally syntonic measurement tool for investigating minority stress and health disparities within Sinophone bisexual populations.
Keywords
Chinese Internalized Binegativity Scale, Internalized Binegativity, Bisexuality, Monosexism, Family Shame, Minority Stress, Psychometrics, Cultural Adaptation, Greater China, Sexual Minority Mental Health
Authors
The Chinese Internalized Binegativity Scale was developed by Chongzheng Wei, Ph.D., and Tania Israel, Ph.D.
- Chongzheng Wei, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara.
ORCID: 0000-0001-5992-1689
Email: [email protected]
Correspondence Address: University of California, Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology, 18 Ocean Road, Santa Barbara, California, 93117, United States. - Tania Israel, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Scholar Profile: Professor of Counseling Psychology specializing in sexual and gender minority wellbeing, intersectionality, and community interventions.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Chinese Internalized Binegativity Scale (CIBS) is to provide a psychometrically sound, culturally nuanced, and theoretically grounded measurement instrument to evaluate internalized binegativity among self-identified bisexual individuals across diverse Chinese-speaking regions, specifically Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Internalized binegativity refers to the psychological internalization of negative societal attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes, and systemic stigma toward bisexuality by individuals who experience sexual or romantic attractions to more than one gender.
Historically, psychological research on sexual minorities has subsumed bisexual individuals under generalized “lesbian and gay” frameworks, frequently applying instruments designed to measure internalized homophobia. Such practices obscure the unique stressors experienced by bisexual persons, commonly termed “double discrimination” or “double marginalization,” originating from both heterosexual society and monosexual gay and lesbian communities. Bisexual individuals face distinctive stigmatizing tropes, including accusations of hypersexuality, promiscuity, emotional untrustworthiness, and the presumption that bisexuality is merely an unstable, transitional phase masking homosexuality. Consequently, existing internalized homophobia scales fail to capture the specific cognitive, affective, and relational facets of internalized binegativity.
Furthermore, psychological instruments developed in Western sociocultural milieus often fail to capture the cultural realities governing gender and sexual diversity in East Asian societies. In Chinese cultural contexts, individual identity is profoundly situated within collectivistic family structures, Confucian expectations of filial piety (xiao), ancestral continuity through patrilineal descent, and social face (mianzi). As a consequence, non-heterosexual desires and relational patterns frequently evoke unique forms of familial distress, perceived personal illegitimacy, and interpersonal guilt.
The CIBS resolves these psychometric and cross-cultural limitations by offering an instrument developed specifically for bisexual individuals operating under Sinophone cultural systems. In clinical contexts, the CIBS serves as an invaluable diagnostic and therapeutic evaluation tool, enabling practitioners to identify specific internalized cognitive distortions, address cultural identity conflicts, and evaluate psychological interventions designed to foster bisexual identity integration. In empirical research, the CIBS facilitates the investigation of minority stress processes, examining the mechanisms through which culturally contextualized stigma precipitates mental health challenges, such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety, suicidality, and barriers to self-disclosure.
Psychological Construct
The psychological construct evaluated by the CIBS is internalized binegativity, conceptualized as a multidimensional phenomenological structure tailored to Chinese sociocultural realities. While rooted in broader minority stress and anti-bisexual stigma paradigms, the construct in the CIBS is composed of six distinct, correlated dimensions across 25 self-report items:
1. Illegitimacy
The Illegitimacy dimension captures the internalized belief that bisexuality is not a genuine, valid, or stable sexual orientation, but rather a temporary, transitional state, a form of personal denial, or a defense mechanism used to evade homosexuality. Rooted in pervasive monosexist discourses, individuals scoring high on this dimension view their multi-gender attractions as illegitimate, questioning the permanence and authenticity of their orientation (e.g., conceptualizing bisexuality as a mere transitional phase or an inability to embrace a gay identity).
2. Monosexism
The Monosexism dimension measures the personal desire to conform to monosexual paradigms—namely, wishing to be attracted exclusively to one gender, whether heterosexual or homosexual. This subscale reflects the psychological exhaustion and cognitive burden generated by maintaining attraction to multiple genders in a world structured around binary desires, leading individuals to believe that life would be simpler, less burdened, and more socially legible if they were exclusively attracted to a single gender.
3. Aversion
The Aversion dimension captures deep-seated affective and moral self-disapproval, visceral self-disgust, personal shame, and guilt arising from experiencing multi-gender attractions. This subscale measures the most emotionally toxic manifestations of internalized stigma, wherein an individual views their multi-gender attractions as morally impure, emotionally repulsive, or fundamentally degrading.
4. Irresponsibility
The Irresponsibility dimension reflects the internalization of negative cultural stereotypes asserting that bisexual individuals are inherently untrustworthy, deceptive, hypersexual, disloyal, and uncommitted in romantic and community contexts. High scores denote the endorsement or fear of enacting common tropes, such as being perceived as “greedy,” unable to remain faithful to a single partner, betraying the broader sexual minority collective, or attempting to “set feet on both boats” (脚踏两条船), a common Chinese idiom denoting relational deceit and opportunistic duality.
5. Family Shame
The Family Shame dimension is a culturally specific subscale derived from Confucian collectivism, filial piety, and relational ethics. This factor measures the perceived burden of bringing dishonor, disappointment, and moral humiliation to one’s parents and extended kinship lineage as a consequence of being bisexual or having a same-gender partner. In Sinophone contexts, individual sexual identity is rarely experienced purely as an individual preference; rather, violating heteronormative expectations of marriage and procreation directly compromises the lineage’s moral standing and social capital.
6. Identity Affirmation
The Identity Affirmation dimension reflects the positive integration, self-acceptance, pride, and psychological appreciation of one’s bisexuality. Unlike the preceding five dimensions, which represent negative internalizations of stigma, Identity Affirmation represents psychological resilience, self-congruence, and celebratory identification. In calculating total internalized binegativity, this subscale is reverse-scored, signifying that low identity affirmation functions as an essential marker of unintegrated identity distress.
Theoretical Framework
The conceptual architecture of the CIBS is anchored in the integration of Minority Stress Theory (Meyer, 2003), systemic models of Bisexual Marginalization and Monosexism (Paul et al., 2014; Roberts et al., 2015), and Chinese Cultural Psychology emphasizing relational and familistic self-construals.
Minority Stress Theory and Bisexual Invisibility
Meyer’s (2003) Minority Stress Theory posits that sexual minorities endure chronic, excess psychological stress stemming from a hostile, heteronormative social environment. This stress unfolds along a continuum extending from distal stressors (e.g., objective discrimination, interpersonal violence, prejudice events) to proximal stressors (e.g., expectation of rejection, concealment of identity, and internalized stigma). Within this paradigm, internalized binegativity represents the ultimate proximal manifestation of anti-bisexual societal hostility, wherein external social devaluation is internalized into one’s own self-concept.
However, traditional minority stress frameworks were predominantly formulated around the experiences of gay men and lesbian women, implicitly presuming that sexual orientation stigma functions along a simple heterosexual-versus-homosexual binary. Bisexual theorists have expanded this framework by demonstrating that bisexual people experience distinct forms of oppression driven by monosexism—the pervasive social paradigm that considers sexual attraction to only one gender as the sole natural, legitimate, and morally coherent form of human sexuality. Consequently, bisexual people experience pervasive bisexual erasure, invalidated legitimacy, and double marginalization from both heterosexual and homosexual communities.
Cultural Adaptation and Sinophone Familism
A central theoretical premise of the CIBS is that psychological constructs cannot be imported directly across cultural boundaries without structural re-theorization. In Western, individualistic contexts, internalized binegativity scales typically prioritize individual autonomy, personal sexual ethics, and individual self-esteem. Conversely, in Chinese societies influenced by Confucianism, Daoism, and traditional kinship networks, the self is fundamentally relational and interdependent.
Under the cultural imperative of filial piety (孝, xiao), children are socialized to maintain ancestral honor, fulfill filial duties toward parents, and ensure patrilineal continuation through heterosexual marriage and childbearing. When a bisexual individual experiences romantic attraction toward a same-gender partner, the conflict is experienced not merely as an individual identity dilemma, but as a severe moral failure that inflicts public shame (丢脸, diu lian) and moral guilt upon the family collective. By theoretically formalizing the Family Shame and culturally distinct Irresponsibility dimensions alongside Western-derived factors, Wei and Israel (2023) constructed a psychometrically rigorous framework capturing the full phenomenological reality of bisexual identity distress in Greater China.
Validity
The Chinese Internalized Binegativity Scale was evaluated through extensive psychometric testing across diverse samples in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, demonstrating exceptional structural, convergent, and predictive validity.
Content and Cultural Validity
Content validity was established through a multi-stage qualitative adaptation protocol. The authors translated items from the Bisexual Identity Inventory (Paul et al., 2014) into Chinese using standard translation and back-translation procedures. To address cultural omissions, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with six bisexual experts (counselors, scholars, and community organizers) and six bisexual laypersons residing across the target regions. This process generated new culturally emergent items reflecting filial expectations, family dishonor, and regionally specific idioms (e.g., “feet on both boats”), ensuring exceptional ecological validity.
Construct and Convergent Validity
To establish convergent construct validity, CIBS subscale and composite scores were correlated with established psychometric scales measuring related psychological constructs. The CIBS exhibited statistically significant, theoretically consistent correlations with:
- Internalized Homophobia: The five stigma subscales (Illegitimacy, Monosexism, Aversion, Irresponsibility, and Family Shame) and the overall scale score demonstrated moderate to strong positive correlations with internalized homophobia measures ($r = .29$ to $.50, p < .001$). The Identity Affirmation subscale demonstrated a corresponding inverse relationship, confirming that the scale assesses sexual minority identity distress while maintaining conceptual distinctiveness.
- Private Collective Self-Esteem: The CIBS subscales correlated negatively with private collective self-esteem ($r = -.26$ to $-.64, p < .001$), indicating that higher internalized binegativity directly undermines an individual’s positive emotional evaluation of their social group membership. The Identity Affirmation subscale was positively correlated with collective self-esteem.
Predictive and Criterion Validity
The predictive utility of the CIBS was confirmed through its significant associations with behavioral and clinical outcomes:
- Outness (Sexual Orientation Disclosure): All CIBS subscales were significantly associated with lower levels of outness ($r = -.12$ to $-.32$), demonstrating that internalized binegativity acts as an internal psychological barrier preventing open self-disclosure across diverse social domains.
- Depressive Symptomatology: In accordance with minority stress hypotheses, four of the CIBS subscales (Monosexism, Aversion, Irresponsibility, and Family Shame) exhibited statistically significant positive correlations with clinical depression scores ($r = .12$ to $.24$), underscoring the instrument’s utility in predicting mental health disparities among bisexual individuals.
Reliability
The CIBS exhibits exceptional internal consistency, reliability, and measurement stability across various psychometric evaluations:
- Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Classical internal consistency estimates for the six CIBS subscales ranged from $\alpha = .76$ to $\alpha = .91$, exceeding standard psychometric thresholds ($ge .70$) for psychological research and individual diagnostic screening. The overall scale demonstrated high global consistency.
- McDonald’s Omega (ω): Because Cronbach’s alpha often underestimates reliability in multidimensional and congeneric scales, McDonald’s categorical omega was computed. Across the CIBS subscales, $\omega$ coefficients ranged from $0.85$ to $0.91$, confirming superior composite reliability without relying on the restrictive assumption of tau-equivalence.
- Factor Determinacy: Factor determinacy coefficients evaluated within the latent structural model ranged between $.92$ and $.97$. Values exceeding $.90$ confirm that latent factor scores are accurately identified and can serve as reliable proxies for underlying latent traits in structural equation modeling (SEM).
Factor Analysis
The dimensionality of the CIBS was evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across independent split-half calibration and validation samples of bisexual participants from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
A rigorous CFA was executed to evaluate the hypothesized 25-item, six-factor model. Goodness-of-fit was judged against standard structural guidelines (Hu & Bentler, 1999): Comparative Fit Index (CFI) $ge .95$, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) $ge .95$, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) $le .06$, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) $le .08$. The six-factor model exhibited superior fit indices:
- Chi-Square: $\chi^2 = 397.458$, degrees of freedom ($df$) = $260$, $p < .001$
- CFI: $.95$
- TLI: $.95$
- RMSEA: $.039$ ($90%\text{ CI } [.031, .047]$)
- SRMR: $.06$
All 25 items loaded significantly and strongly onto their designated latent factors, with standardized factor loadings remaining uniformly high and free of significant cross-loadings.
Bifactor Structural Model
To evaluate whether the CIBS can be interpreted via an overarching global internalized binegativity score in addition to its discrete subscales, a bifactor confirmatory model was tested. The bifactor structure posits a single general factor (Internalized Binegativity) alongside six orthogonal group factors. The bifactor model displayed excellent fit to the data:
- Chi-Square: $\chi^2 = 362.180$, $df = 250$, $p < .001$
- CFI: $.96$
- TLI: $.96$
- RMSEA: $.036$ ($90%\text{ CI } [.028, .044]$)
- SRMR: $.06$
These bifactor findings provide empirical justification for researchers and clinicians to utilize either the six distinct multidimensional subscale scores or a unified composite score when modeling minority stress in structural equation modeling (SEM).
Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Test Type: Multidimensional Psychometric Self-Report Inventory / Rating Scale.
- Construct Assessed: Internalized Binegativity (IB) across culturally tailored dimensions.
- Target Population: Bisexual individuals, including cisgender men, cisgender women, transgender individuals, and nonbinary or gender-diverse adults who experience sexual or romantic attractions to more than one gender.
- Age Group: Adults (18 years and older), including young adulthood (18–29), thirties (30–39), and middle age (40–64).
- Cultural & Linguistic Context: Chinese-speaking populations in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Administered in Simplified Chinese (Mainland China) and Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong, Taiwan).
- Number of Items: 25 items structured into 6 subscales:
- Illegitimacy (Items 1–4; 4 items)
- Monosexism (Items 5–8; 4 items)
- Aversion (Items 9–12; 4 items)
- Irresponsibility (Items 13–17; 5 items)
- Family Shame (Items 18–20; 3 items)
- Identity Affirmation (Items 21–25; 5 items)
- Administration Format: Electronic questionnaire (online survey administration via computer, smartphone, or tablet).
- Response Scale: 7-point response scale with anchors labeled at each end (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).
- Scoring Guidelines:
- Subscale Scores: Computed by calculating the mean or sum of the items comprising each specific subscale.
- Identity Affirmation: Items 21–25 measure positive identity integration and psychological resilience. In subscale-specific analyses, higher scores reflect higher affirmation.
- Total Binegativity Composite Score: If an overall composite score is computed, the five Identity Affirmation items must be reverse-scored ($8 – \text{item score}$ on a 1–7 scale) prior to computing the global mean or total sum. Higher composite scores signify greater internalized binegativity.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
- Publication Year: 2023.
- Permissions: The scale is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA) and the authors (Wei & Israel, 2023). The authors have made the CIBS accessible for non-commercial academic research, empirical study, and educational/teaching purposes without licensing fees.
- Commercial Use: Prohibited without explicit formal written permission from the copyright owners and authors.
- Contact for Permissions & Implementation: Dr. Chongzheng Wei ([email protected]), University of California, Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology, Santa Barbara, CA 93117.
References
Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
Paul, R., Smith, N. G., Mohr, J. J., & Ross, L. E. (2014). Measuring dimensions of bisexual identity: Initial development of the Bisexual Identity Inventory. Journal of Sex Research, 51(4), 452–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2013.806647
Roberts, T. S., Horne, S. G., & Hoyt, W. T. (2015). Between a rock and a hard place: A review of bisexual minority stress and depression. Journal of Bisexuality, 15(4), 531–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2015.1078652
Wei, C., & Israel, T. (2023). The Chinese Internalized Binegativity Scale: Measure development and cultural adaptation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 70(6), 657–670. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000707