Measurement of Sexual Behavior Stigma in Cisgender Mexican Sexual Minority Men: Contextual Considerations of Living in Mexico or the United States

We used data from the 2018 and 2019 cycles of the American Men's Internet Survey (AMIS) and the Encuesta de Sexo Entre Hombres (ESEH) (2017) to investigate measurement invariance of a sexual behavior stigma scale among Mexican gay, bisexual, and other sexual minority men (SMM). Employing both a two- and three-group multiple group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), we established configural invariance of the scale, suggesting a uniform factor pattern structure across Mexican SMM subgroups based on country of origin and country of residence: (1) Mexican SMM in the ESEH dataset (N = 15,015), (2) Mexican SMM born in Mexico in the AMIS data (N = 218), and (3) Mexicans born in the USA in the AMIS data (N = 1606). The three-group MGCFA models, which separated the Mexican SMM in the USA who were born in Mexico from those who were born in the USA, demonstrated greater robustness, suggesting that the experiences of stigma among individuals within each group were more similar than when the two AMIS groups were combined. The nuanced findings underscore the importance of considering both nativity and current residence in studying sexual behavior stigma among Mexican SMM. Variations in factor loadings and prevalence of violence-related items across subgroups highlight the contextually dependent nature of sexual behavior stigma and emphasize the need for context-specific measurement tools to comprehensively understand the multifaceted nature of sexual behavior stigma within diverse populations and settings.