Publication Date



College of Arts and Sciences


Psychology: Clinical/Experimental

Primary Subject Area

Psychology, Social; Psychology, Clinical


Cyber Pornography Use Inventory, CPUI, Religion, Internet pornography addiction


Clinical Psychology | Social Psychology


While Internet pornography use is becoming increasingly common in today’s society, until recently no instrument existed to measure compulsive use. Consequently, the Cyber Pornography Use Inventory (CPUI) was developed in order to assess Internet pornography addiction. While demonstrating promise as an assessment tool, the CPUI was only tested on a religious population. In addition to being strongly opposed to pornography, religious males experience extreme distress from their usage and often perceive their behavior as addictive, despite no supporting clinical evidence. Therefore, it seemed necessary to explore the psychometric capabilities of the CPUI further by administering it to a secular population. All subscales demonstrated acceptable levels of internal reliability in both samples. While secular males and females reported significantly higher levels of pornography use, religious males and females scored significantly higher on the Guilt and Addictive Patterns subscales. However, the participants’ environments, as represented by their schools, accounted for a large portion of the variance in Guilt scores for males (55%) and females (39%). There are resulting implications and future research directions.