2.3.5. Sexual Orientation Concealment

The Outness Inventory (OI) [39,52] is an 11-item scale for assessing the degree of openness about an LG individual's sexual orientation with 11 individuals or groups (i.e., mother, father, siblings, extended family, new and old straight friends, work peers and supervisors, members and leaders of religious communities, and strangers). This measure included three scales: family, world, and religion. Overall outness was calculated as the subscales average. The response options ranged from "person definitely does not know about your sexual orientation status" to "person definitely knows about your sexual orientation status, and it is openly talked about" on a seven-point Likert scale. Scores were recoded so that higher scores indicated greater sexual orientation concealment. In the current study, the internal consistency reliability for the entire scale was α = 0.80.
