Short Forms of the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale and the Social Phobia Scale

Abstract

Mattick and Clarke's (1998) Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) and Social Phobia Scale (SPS) are commonly used self-report measures that assess 2 dimensions of social anxiety. Given the need for short, readable measures, this research proposes short forms of both scales. Item-level analyses of readability characteristics of the SIAS and SPS items led to the selection of 6 items from each scale for use in the short forms. The SIAS and SPS short forms had reading levels at approximately the 6th and 5th grade level, respectively. Results using nonclinical (Study 1: N = 469) and clinical (Study 2: N = 145) samples identified these short forms as being factorially sound, possessing adequate internal consistency, and having strong convergence with their full-length counterparts. Moreover, these short forms showed convergence with other measures of social anxiety, showed divergence from measures assessing related constructs, and predicted concurrent interpersonal functioning. Recommendations for the use of these short forms are discussed.

Notes

We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point and helping us to broaden our readability evaluation.

Item characteristics for SIAS Item 1 (I get nervous if I have to speak with someone in authority [teacher, boss, etc.]), were computed treating “etc.” as “etcetera.”

The goodness-of-fit statistics and factor loadings of the full-length SIAS and SPS are presented for descriptive purposes rather than as a formal evaluation of the full-length versions of these scales. Readers interested in a recent factor-analytic evaluation of the full-length versions of the SIAS and SPS are referred to Heidenreich et al. (2011).

Descriptive statistics for the full-length SIAS and BFNE differ from those reported by Fergus et al. (2009). More specifically, the reported descriptive statistics in this research only included the 17 straightforward SIAS items and Fergus et al. used the full 20-item version of the SIAS. Further, Fergus et al. scored the SIAS and BFNE using a 1 to 5 scale, whereas the research reported here used the standardized 0-to-4 scoring.

Because no reliability estimates were available for diagnoses, we felt that basing group membership on the established SIAS cutoff score of 34 for the ROC analyses would provide a more valid approach to identifying a replicable SIAS short-form cutoff score.