Pornography Violence Exposure Scale: a graded bifactor measure of exposure to violent pornographic content

Introduction Research on associations between pornography viewing and sexual violence has been limited by the absence of validated instruments that differentiate exposure along a violence continuum within pornographic practices, with existing measures focused on consumption frequency or problematic patterns rather than on the specific content consumed. The Pornography Violence Exposure Scale (PVES) was developed to assess exposure to pornographic content graded across three violence levels: non-violent material and domination-without-pain (Level 1), coercive content (Level 2), and explicit physical aggression (Level 3). Methods A cross-sectional study with 2,181 Spanish young adults aged 18–35 years who reported viewing pornography examined factor structure, measurement invariance across sex and age, convergent, nomological, and incremental validity, and discriminative capacity for sexual violence outcomes via Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. Results A bifactor model demonstrated good fit (CFI = 0.978, TLI = 0.957, RMSEA = 0.076), with a dominant general factor (ωH = 0.84, ECV = 0.81) capturing graded exposure to violent content. Strict measurement invariance was supported across sex and age groups. Convergent correlations with sexual violence outcomes (mean | r | = 0.24) substantially exceeded near-zero nomological associations with sexual function and partner-evaluation indicators (mean |r| = 0.03), and the general factor produced significant incremental validity for both victimization (Δ R 2 = 0.088) and perpetration (Δ R 2 = 0.200), with acceptable discrimination for perpetration (AUC = 0.753). Discussion The PVES is the first psychometrically validated instrument for measuring differentiated exposure to violent pornographic content, enabling more precise investigation of content-specific associations with sexual violence outcomes.