Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C), an instrument developed in the United States and applied to a sample of Brazilian schoolchildren. The process included the translation of the original material from English into Portuguese by two bilingual psychiatrists and a back translation by a bilingual physician. Both the front and back translations were revised by a bilingual child psychiatrist. The study was performed using a cross-sectional design and the Portuguese version of the SPAI-C was applied to a sample of 1954 children enrolled in 3rd to 8th grade attending 2 private and 11 public schools. Eighty-one subjects were excluded due to an incomplete questionnaire and 2 children refused to participate. The final sample consisted of 1871 children, 938 girls (50.1%) and 933 boys (49.8%), ranging in age from 9 to 14 years. The majority of the students were Caucasian (89.0%) and the remainder were African-Brazilian (11.0%). The Pearson product-moment correlation showed that the two-week test-retest reliability coefficient was r = 0.780 and Cronbach's alpha was 0.946. The factor structure was almost similar to that reported in previous studies. The results regarding the internal consistency, the test-retest reliability and the factor structure were similar to the findings obtained in studies performed on English speaking children. The present study showed that the Portuguese language version of SPAI-C is a reliable and valid measure of social anxiety for Brazilian children.
Highlights
Social anxiety disorder is the fear of being watched or evaluated by others
The purpose of the present study was to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C), an instrument developed in the United States and applied to a sample of Brazilian schoolchildren
The results of internal consistency and the test-retest reliability were similar to the findings in studies performed with children in areas where English is spoken
Summary
Social anxiety disorder ( known as social phobia) is the fear of being watched or evaluated by others People with this disorder are extremely afraid they might say or do something that may embarrass them or expose them to criticism. Social anxiety disorder continues to be largely ignored in clinical practice, and it is quite likely that many clinicians do not take it as seriously as they should. This is unfortunate because, in the great majority of cases, social anxiety disorder in children responds extraordinarily well to cognitive behavioral therapy and psychopharmacotherapy [5,6,7,8,9]. It is really important to have reliable instruments during the disorder evaluation process
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