Measuring Social Anxiety in 11 Countries

Abstract

This paper reports on two studies conducted to develop and validate a new self-report measure of social phobia/anxiety – the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Adults (SAQ-A) (Cuestionario de ansiedad social para adultos, CASO-A). A diary-item recording procedure was used to generate the initial pool of items. In Study 1, data from 12,144 participants provided 6 factors with moderate intercorrelations. Estimates of internal consistency reliability were adequate (range = .86 to .92) for the 6 factors included in the final confirmatory factor analysis. In Study 2, data provided by 10,118 nonclinical participants were used to explore preliminary reliability and validity estimates for a revised version of the SAQ-A – the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Adults Revised (SAQ-AR). Approximately 106 researchers from 10 Latin American countries and Spain contributed to this data collection process. Specific comments are made on the structure of the new questionnaire as regards some commonly-used self-report measures of social phobia/anxiety.