Anxiety Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Anxiety, including details on anxiety disorder, panic attacks, medication, counselling, therapy.

The reverse of social anxiety is not always the opposite: the reverse-scored items of the social interaction anxiety scale do not belong.

Rodebaugh TL, Woods CM, Heimberg RG

Washington University in Saint Louis, USA. rodebaugh@wustl.edu

Although well-used and empirically supported, the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) has a questionable factor structure and includes reverse-scored items with questionable utility. Here, using samples of undergraduates and a sample of clients with social anxiety disorder, we extend previous work that opened the question of whether the reverse-scored items belong on the scale. First, we successfully confirmed the factor structure obtained in previous samples. Second, we found the reverse-scored items to show consistently weaker relationships with a variety of comparison measures. Third, we demonstrated that removing the reverse-scored questions generally helps rather than hinders the psychometric performance of the SIAS total score. Fourth, we found that the reverse-scored items show a strong relationship with the normal personality characteristic of extraversion, suggesting that the reverse-scored items may primarily assess extraversion. Given the above results, we suggest investigators consider performing data analyses using only the straightforwardly worded items of the SIAS.

Published 14 May 2007 in Behav Ther, 38(2): 192-206.
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