Stage Fright Scale – Children & Youth: Development and Validation of a New Questionnaire

Abstract

Stage fright is a natural and very common phenomenon that affects everyone who must present themselves in public. However, it has a negative impact on the health and voice emission of children and adolescents, which is why it is important to study and measure it. Unfortunately, there are no appropriate tools for examining public presentation anxiety intended for children and adolescents, and that would also include the context of voice production. The main aim of this study was to describe stage fright and to present the stages of creating a tool based on the three-factor theory of stage fright constructs. The text describes the steps of developing the questionnaire, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity. The results of the conducted analyses confirmed the three-factor structure of the tool and suggest that the Stage Fright Scale – Children & Youth is a reliable and consistent questionnaire for measuring stage fright in children and adolescents.