Compersion is a well-known term in polyamorous communities that connotes the positive emotion an individual may experience in relation to their partner’s relationship with another partner. We know little about this emotion or about the factors that facilitate or inhibit its expression. The lack of a standardized measure for compersion has likely contributed to its neglect in the empirical literature. We sought to remedy this gap by creating a reliable and valid quantitative scale, The COMPERSe (Classifying Our Metamour/Partner Emotional Response Scale), through a multi-stage, bottom-up process grounded in a qualitative understanding of consensually non-monogamous (CNM) individuals’ lived experience of compersion. This paper describes the thematic analysis of qualitative data (n = 44) which underpinned item generation, revision of the item pool based on researcher, practitioner, and community member feedback, exploratory (n = 310) and confirmatory factor analyses (n = 320) to ascertain the factor structure of the data, and examination of convergent and divergent validity. Results supported the use of a three-factor scale (Happiness about Partner/Metamour Relationship, Excitement for New Connections, and Sexual Arousal), which demonstrated excellent internal consistency as well as strong divergent and convergent validity.

Compersion 是多角恋社区中的一个众所周知的术语，它意味着一个人可能会体验到与他们的伴侣与另一个伴侣的关系相关的积极情绪。我们对这种情绪或促进或抑制其表达的因素知之甚少。缺乏标准化的竞争衡量标准可能导致其在经验文献中被忽视。我们试图通过建立一个可靠且有效的定量量表 COMPERSe（对我们的 Metamour/Partner Emotional Response Scale 进行分类）来弥补这一差距，该过程基于对双方同意的非一夫一妻制 (CNM) 的定性理解，通过多阶段、自下而上的过程) 个人的生活经历。本文描述了定性数据的专题分析（n = 44) 支持项目生成，根据研究人员、从业者和社区成员的反馈修改项目库，探索性 ( n  = 310) 和验证性因子分析 ( n  = 320) 以确定数据的因子结构，以及检查收敛效度和发散效度。结果支持使用三因素量表（关于伴侣/Metamour 关系的幸福感、对新联系的兴奋和性唤起），这表明了极好的内部一致性以及强大的发散和收敛效度。