An empirically derived inventory to measure social fears and anxiety: The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory.

Abstract

The development, reliability, and discriminative ability of a new instrument to assess social phobia are presented. The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) is an empirically derived instrument incorporating responses from the cognitive, somatic, and behavioral dimensions of social fear. The SPAI has high lest-retest reliability and good internal consistency. The instrument appears to be sensitive to the entire continuum of socially anxious concerns and is capable of differentiating social phobics from normal controls as well as from other anxiety patients. The utility of this instrument for improved assessment of social phobia and anxiety and its use as an aid for treatment planning are discussed. Social phobia is perhaps the least understood and the least researched of the anxiety disorders. Although there are several scales available to measure social anxiety, most were constructed prior to publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-lII; American Psychiatric Association, 1980), where the diagnostic criteria for social phobia were first introduced. Because social anxiety is experienced by individuals with many psychiatric disorders as well as by normals, these scales may not be specific to social phobia. Preparation of an instrument designed more specifically to assess social phobia requires consideration of several issues, including the critical features of the disorder, its cognitive, physiological, and behavioral dimensions (Lang, 1977), and the capability to sample behavior across a range of potentially distressful social situations. In addition, because social phobics differ in the degree of distress or functional impairment resulting from the disorder, the ability to assess level of severity would be a particularly positive feature of such an instrument. The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) is a new, empirically derived self-report inventory. Its construction was based on the behavioral-analytic model outlined by Goldfried and D'Zurilla (1969). It assesses specific somatic symptoms, cognitions, and behavior across a range of potentially fear-producing situations. In order to assess severity, a Likert-scale format is used. This article describes the development and initial psychometric characteristics of the SPAI.