The Fear Questionnaire

Abstract

In order to assess some psychometric properties of Marks & Mathews' (1979) short Fear Questionnaire, a Dutch translation of this form was administered to 143 phobic outpatients: 100 women and 43 men. There was a special interest in assessing validity by comparing the scores of agoraphobics, social phobics and simple phobics. The findings were that all scales have sufficient internal consistency, although the Total Phobia scale does not seem to add meaningful information to its subscales. Most scales are significantly related to neuroticism, and the Social Phobia subscale is strongly related to social anxiety. The Agoraphobia and Social Phobia subscales discriminate between categories of phobics in the expected way. For the Blood/Injury subscale the relevant comparisons could not be made. The data presented in this study can be used to develop FQ norms for phobic patients.