Outness Inventory

Abstract

The Outness Inventory (OI), developed by Jonathan J. Mohr and Ruth E. Fassinger in 2000, is one of the most widely utilized psychometric instruments in lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) psychology and identity research. Designed to capture the situational and relational complexity of sexual orientation disclosure, the Outness Inventory departs from historical dichotomous conceptualizations of being either “in the closet” or “out.” Instead, it assesses disclosure as a continuous, multidimensional behavioral process across distinct spheres of an individual’s social environment. The instrument comprises 11 items assessing degree of disclosure to specific individuals and social networks, including family members, heterosexual peers, workplace associates, and religious institutions.

Each item is evaluated on a 7-point rating scale ranging from 1 (person definitely does NOT know about your sexual orientation status) to 7 (person definitely knows about your sexual orientation status, and it is OPENLY talked about), alongside an explicit non-applicable option (coded as 0 or omitted from calculation) for social targets that do not exist within the respondent’s life. The scale yields an Overall Outness score as well as three robust subscale scores: Out to Family (items 1–4), Out to World (items 5–8), and Out to Work or School Peers (items 9–11, occasionally conceptualized in community validation studies as outness to specific religious or specialized institutional networks). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha ranging from .74 to .91 across subscales and reaching .89 to .93 for the overall score), strong test-retest reliability, and well-established convergent, discriminant, and construct validity. The Outness Inventory has advanced empirical investigations into minority stress, concealment, psychological well-being, interpersonal relationship functioning, and vocational development among sexual minority individuals.

Keywords

Outness Inventory, Jonathan J. Mohr, Ruth E. Fassinger, sexual orientation disclosure, sexual identity, coming out, LGB psychology, minority stress theory, identity management, concealment.

Authors

The Outness Inventory was developed by Jonathan J. Mohr, Ph.D., and Ruth E. Fassinger, Ph.D.

• Jonathan J. Mohr, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarly work focuses on LGBTQ+ mental health, close relationships, identity development, and the operationalization and measurement of stigmatized social identities. Dr. Mohr has contributed extensively to psychometrics in counseling psychology, developing multiple validated scales assessing internalized heterosexism, identity confusion, and sexual identity management.
• Ruth E. Fassinger, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park, and former Dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. An internationally recognized scholar and Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 17, 35, and 44), Dr. Fassinger has published foundational theoretical models and empirical investigations on lesbian and gay identity formation, vocational psychology of marginalized groups, and feminist research methodologies.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Outness Inventory is to provide an empirically grounded, nuanced, and psychometrically valid measurement tool that captures the extent to which sexual minority individuals disclose their sexual orientation to different individuals and social collectives. Historically, psychological research operationalized “coming out” as a static, milestone-based, or all-or-nothing phenomenon—categorizing individuals simply as disclosed or undisclosed. Mohr and Fassinger (2000) recognized that disclosure is inherently relational, dynamic, and selective; an individual may be completely open with chosen heterosexual friends while remaining entirely closeted to parental figures, supervisors, or religious communities.

By measuring both knowledge (whether someone knows) and communication frequency (how openly it is discussed), the Outness Inventory serves several primary clinical and empirical functions:

• Research Applications in Minority Stress: In empirical research, the Outness Inventory functions as a vital instrument to test Ilan H. Meyer’s Minority Stress Model. It allows researchers to evaluate how identity concealment acts as a distal or proximal stressor, investigating how varying levels of domain-specific outness correlate with psychological distress, depression, anxiety, substance use, and physiological stress markers.
• Vocational and Organizational Psychology: The scale enables organizational researchers to examine workplace climate, occupational barriers, glass-ceiling phenomena, and interpersonal support among sexual minorities. Disaggregating outness to workplace supervisors and peers from general social outness has allowed investigators to pinpoint the organizational factors that facilitate psychological safety and career satisfaction.
• Family Dynamics and Developmental Research: In developmental and family studies, the inventory helps isolate how parental knowledge and relational openness impact youth and adult well-being, parent-child relationship quality, and identity consolidation over the lifespan.
• Clinical and Counseling Assessment: In clinical contexts, the Outness Inventory serves as an assessment tool to explore a client’s disclosure patterns, fear of negative evaluation, compartmentalization strategies, and social support systems. Therapists can identify discrepancies across life spheres (e.g., high world outness coupled with complete family concealment) to facilitate culturally competent interventions that respect the client’s agency and contextual safety.

Psychological Construct

The central construct measured by the Outness Inventory is sexual orientation disclosure (commonly referred to as “outness”), defined as the degree to which a sexual minority person openly communicates their sexual identity within their interpersonal environment. Unlike unidimensional constructs of identity disclosure, Mohr and Fassinger operationalized outness as comprising two intertwined components: informational awareness (the target’s cognitive knowledge of the individual’s sexual orientation) and behavioral communicative openness (the frequency and ease with which sexual orientation is explicitly discussed).

Multidimensional Domains of Outness

The inventory evaluates outness across distinct relational domains, recognizing that social spheres present differential risks of rejection, stigmatization, and interpersonal conflict:

• Out to Family: Encompassing nuclear family members (mother, father, siblings) and extended kin (aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins). Disclosure within the family domain carries profound emotional and developmental significance. Family members represent non-voluntary relationships characterized by historical attachment patterns. High outness in this domain reflects both parental/familial knowledge and active dialogue, whereas low outness indicates identity concealment driven by fear of familial estrangement, emotional rejection, or material disinvestment.
• Out to World (Heterosexual Social Network): Comprising new straight friends, old straight friends, and everyday social contacts. This dimension reflects an individual’s comfort navigating the broader heteronormative social ecology. Because peer relationships are voluntary, disclosure in this realm reflects personal agency, social integration, and confidence in one’s social standing without fear of interpersonal loss.
• Out to Work, Peers, and Institutional Community: Assessing disclosure to colleagues, supervisors, classmates, and religious figures. Disclosing within formal institutions and professional hierarchies introduces tangible vulnerabilities regarding career advancement, employment stability, economic security, and spiritual belonging. High outness in these institutional domains indicates substantial environmental safety or high identity commitment that overrides institutional risks.

Theoretical Framework

The Outness Inventory is anchored within multiple foundational theoretical perspectives in counseling psychology, social psychology, and sociology:

1. Ecological Systems Theory and Contextual Identity

Grounded in Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, the Outness Inventory posits that human development occurs within nested ecological systems—microsystems (family, workplace, religious community), mesosystems (the interactions between family and peer circles), and macrosystems (societal heterosexism). Mohr and Fassinger recognized that sexual orientation identity cannot be characterized by a global, context-free attribute. Rather, individuals actively calibrate their identity expression based on the affordances, norms, and perceived dangers of specific microsystems.

2. The Minority Stress Framework

The conceptual basis of the instrument aligns directly with Minority Stress Theory (Meyer, 1995, 2003). Meyer posits that sexual minorities experience chronic, unique stress resulting from stigmatization, heterosexist prejudice, and discrimination. Concealment represents a proximal stressor—a cognitive and behavioral coping strategy designed to avoid distal stressors (such as overt prejudice, physical violence, or relational loss). However, chronic concealment incurs heavy psychological costs, including hypervigilance, cognitive rumination, authentic self-fragmentation, and social isolation. Conversely, outness can reduce the cognitive load of concealment and grant access to LGBTQ+ community connectedness, although it simultaneously elevates exposure to external stigma. The OI captures this tension by measuring the exact ecological loci where concealment versus disclosure is maintained.

3. Sexual Identity Development Models

Classic stage theories of homosexual identity development (e.g., Vivienne Cass’s 1979 model; Fassinger’s 1996 model) conceptualized disclosure as an indicator of advanced identity synthesis. Fassinger’s dual-branch model distinguishes between individual sexual identity development (internal self-acceptance) and group membership identity development (public association and collective alignment). The Outness Inventory directly assesses the external, behavioral arm of group membership development, operationalizing how internal self-definitions are translated into communicative acts across distinct social arenas.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have established the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Outness Inventory across diverse populations of sexual minority individuals.

Construct and Structural Validity

In their seminal scale development study, Mohr and Fassinger (2000) evaluated the instrument with large community and college samples of gay men and lesbian women. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported distinct, correlated factors corresponding to different relational targets. The structural validity of treating outness as multi-domain rather than strictly unidimensional was supported by differential correlations between subscales and external criteria. Family outness, for example, consistently exhibits lower mean scores and higher variance than peer outness, reflecting the heightened relational stakes involved in family disclosure.

Convergent Validity

The Outness Inventory demonstrates substantial convergent validity with established measures of identity development, social support, and disclosure behavior:

• Internalized Heterosexism: The Outness Inventory subscales and overall score correlate negatively with measures of internalized homophobia and internalized heterosexism (e.g., the Lesbian and Gay Identity Scale; Mohr & Fassinger, 2000), confirming that greater self-acceptance is empirically associated with higher disclosure.
• Identity Centrality and Pride: The scale correlates positively with identity pride, collective self-esteem, and involvement in LGB community activities. Individuals who view their sexual identity as a core, positive aspect of self-concept display significantly higher outness scores.
• Behavioral Measures: Observational and interview-based studies confirm that participants with higher OI scores are significantly more likely to introduce same-sex partners to colleagues, display LGBTQ+ literature or symbols, and engage in public advocacy.

Discriminant Validity

The OI has demonstrated strong discriminant validity against constructs with which it should not theoretically overlap:

• General Neuroticism and Social Desirability: Correlations between the Outness Inventory and measures of generalized neuroticism or social desirability response bias are consistently non-significant or trivial (|r| < .12), demonstrating that outness is distinct from general psychological adjustment or tendencies to present oneself favorably.
• Global Extraversion: Although outness entails social communication, research indicates that OI scores do not merely reflect general extraversion; individuals who score low on extraversion can nonetheless exhibit high outness when operating in psychologically safe, affirming environments.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

A vast body of empirical literature has established the predictive power of the OI in relation to mental health outcomes, career outcomes, and physiological indices of stress:

• Psychological Well-Being: Research indicates that congruence between desired outness and actual outness predicts lower depressive symptoms and higher life satisfaction. Furthermore, several longitudinal investigations demonstrate that increases in family outness over time predict decreases in somatic distress, provided parental rejection is low.
• Workplace Dynamics: In occupational research (e.g., Gates, 2012), the workplace outness items have predicted organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, and reduced turnover intentions when paired with perceived organizational support.

Reliability

The Outness Inventory has consistently demonstrated robust internal consistency and stability across diverse empirical investigations and demographic subgroups.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the original validation study by Mohr and Fassinger (2000), internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha) were computed separately for gay men and lesbian women across the subscales and total scale:

• Overall Outness Scale: Cronbach’s α ranged from .89 to .93 across initial developmental samples.
• Out to Family: Cronbach’s α ranged from .74 to .80, indicating cohesive measurement across nuclear and extended familial relationships despite varying degrees of closeness.
• Out to World: Cronbach’s α demonstrated strong internal consistency, typically falling between .79 and .88 across diverse cross-sectional studies.
• Out to Work / Peers / Community: Subscale internal consistency typically ranges from .75 to .84. When religious items are analyzed as a separate subscale in populations with high religious affiliation, internal consistency often exceeds .85.

Subsequent psychometric evaluations across varied socioeconomic, ethnic, and age cohorts have reaffirmed these values. For instance, in studies of ethnically diverse LGB college students, alpha coefficients for the overall score have consistently hovered between .88 and .91, and test-retest reliability across a four-to-six-week interval yielded stability coefficients ranging from .82 to .90, confirming temporal stability in the absence of major life transitions.

Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the Outness Inventory was established using rigorous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Initial Factor Extraction (Mohr & Fassinger, 2000)

During scale construction, Mohr and Fassinger analyzed the 11 items using principal axis factoring with oblique (Promax) rotation, accommodating the theoretical expectation that disclosure across different life domains is intercorrelated. The analysis revealed a clear three-factor solution accounting for the majority of common variance:

• Factor 1: Out to Family (Items 1, 2, 3, 4) — High primary factor loadings were observed for mother (.83), father (.81), siblings (.72), and extended family (.61), with minimal cross-loadings onto non-family factors.
• Factor 2: Out to World (Items 5, 6, 7, 8) — This factor captured broad social networks, with strong loadings from new straight friends (.78), work peers (.71), work supervisor (.65), and members of religious community (.58).
• Factor 3: Specialized Institutional / Peer Networks (Items 9, 10, 11) — Items such as religious leaders, old straight friends, and classmates loaded onto this dimension, reflecting established institutional or legacy peer environments.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

Subsequent structural modeling has supported either a hierarchical model (three first-order factors loading onto a global second-order Outness factor) or a correlated three-factor model. Standard goodness-of-fit indices reported in the literature consistently meet contemporary psychometric criteria:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values regularly range from .93 to .97.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Coefficients typically exceed .92.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates fall between .045 and .068 (90% CI [.038, .077]), indicating acceptable to close approximate fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values are consistently below .06.

In all models, the factor intercorrelations are moderate to large (ranging from r = .42 to r = .68), supporting the clinical reality that while individuals maintain domain-specific disclosure boundaries, an underlying behavioral disposition toward disclosure cuts across social boundaries.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Outness Inventory is structured as follows:

• Test Type: Self-report psychological assessment / behavioral rating scale.
• Construct Measured: Sexual orientation disclosure (outness) across relational and institutional domains.
• Item Count: 11 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point anchored rating scale plus a non-applicable (N/A) option:
  • 1 = person definitely does NOT know about your sexual orientation status
  • 2 = person might know about your sexual orientation status, but it is NEVER talked about
  • 3 = person probably knows about your sexual orientation status, but it is NEVER talked about
  • 4 = person probably knows about your sexual orientation status, but it is RARELY talked about
  • 5 = person definitely knows about your sexual orientation status, but it is RARELY talked about
  • 6 = person definitely knows about your sexual orientation status, and it is SOMETIMES talked about
  • 7 = person definitely knows about your sexual orientation status, and it is OPENLY talked about
  • 0 = not applicable (no such person or group exists in respondent’s life)
• Scoring and Administration Rules:
  • Handling of N/A Responses: Items scored as 0 (N/A) or left blank due to inapplicability (e.g., deceased parent, lack of religious involvement) are omitted entirely from the denominator when calculating means.
  • Subscale Computations: Subscale scores are obtained by calculating the arithmetic mean of applicable items within that subscale:
    • Out to Family: Mean of items 1, 2, 3, and 4.
    • Out to World: Mean of items 5, 6, 7, and 8.
    • Out to Work or School Peers: Mean of items 9, 10, and 11.
  • Overall Outness Score: Mean of all applicable items across the 11 items.
  • Reverse Scoring: No items are reverse scored. Higher scores unambiguously reflect greater knowledge and communicative openness.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Outness Inventory was published in 2000 by Jonathan J. Mohr and Ruth E. Fassinger in the journal Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development (Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 66–90). The scale is copyrighted by the original authors and the publishing body (Taylor & Francis / Association for Assessment and Research in Counseling). However, in accordance with academic standards in counseling psychology, the instrument is available free of charge for non-commercial educational, scientific, and empirical research purposes. Researchers wishing to utilize the Outness Inventory in published empirical studies typically cite the original 2000 instrument without requiring formal licensing fees, though institutional and commercial test battery implementations require explicit permission from the authors or copyright holders.

References

• Cass, V. C. (1979). Homosexual identity formation: A theoretical model. Journal of Homosexuality, 4(3), 219–235. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v04n03_01
• Fassinger, R. E. (1996). Notes from the margins: Integrating lesbian and gay perspectives into theories of work and career development. In Y. B. Chung (Chair), Vocational psychology of sexual minorities. Symposium conducted at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Toronto, ON.
• Gates, T. G. (2012). Lesbian, gay, and bisexual workers in Chicago: Enacted stigmatization, stigma consciousness, and outness (Doctoral dissertation). Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago. https://indigo.uic.edu/bitstream/handle/10027/9506/Gates_Trevor.pdf
• Meyer, I. H. (1995). Minority stress and mental health in gay men. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 36(1), 38–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/2137286
• 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
• Mohr, J., & Fassinger, R. (2000). Measuring dimensions of lesbian and gay male experience. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 33(2), 66–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481756.2000.12068999
• Mohr, J. J., & Kendra, M. S. (2011). Revision and extension of a multidimensional measure of sexual minority identity: The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identity Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 58(2), 234–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022858
• Pachankis, J. E. (2007). The psychological implications of concealing a stigma: A cognitive-affective-behavioral model. Psychological Bulletin, 133(2), 328–345. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.2.328

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)