Differentiating Elderly Medical and Psychiatric Outpatients With the Beck Anxiety Inventory

Abstract

To ascertain whether self-reported anxious symptoms differentiated elderly (≥ 60 years old) medical and psychiatric outpatients, the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) was administered to 45 medical outpatients without psychiatric disorders and 117 psychiatric outpatients with mixed DSM-III-R disorders. The coefficient alphas of the BAI for the medical and psychiatric outpatients were 0.86 and 0.90, respectively. The mean BAI score (19.19, SD = 11.71) of the psychiatric outpatients was approximately 2.7 times higher than that (7.20, SD = 6.68) of the medical outpatients. Although the means for 15 of the 21 BAI symptoms were significantly lower in the medical outpatients than in the psychiatric outpatients, a stepwise discriminant-function analysis indicated that only two symptoms— fear of the worst happening and unsteady—contributed unique variance to the differentiation of the two groups. The results are discussed as supporting the use of the BAI with elderly outpatients.