The effect of Interaction Anxiousness Scale and Brief Social Phobia Scale for screening social anxiety disorder in college students: a study on discriminative validity

Abstract

Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent mental health problems, but there is little research concerning the effective screening instruments in practice.

Methods: This study was designed to examine the discriminative validity of Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS) and Brief Social Phobia Scale (BSPS) for the screening of SAD through the compared and combined analysis. Firstly, 421 Chinese undergraduates were screened by the IAS and BSPS. Secondly, in the follow-up stage, 248 students were interviewed by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was used, and the related psychometric characters were checked.

Results: The results indicated that the ROC in these two scales demonstrated discrimination is in satisfactory level (range: 0.7–0.8). However, the highest agreement (92.17%) was identified when a cut-off point of 50 measured by the IAS and a cut-off point of 34 by the BSPS were combined, also with higher PPV, SENS, SPEC and OA than that reached when BSPS was used individually, as well as PPV, SPEC and OA in IAS.

Conclusion: The findings indicate that the combination of these two scales is valid as the general screening instrument for SAD in maximizing the discriminative validity.

Keywords:

• Discriminative validity
• social anxiety disorders
• screening

Declaration of interest

The authors of this manuscript do not have any conflicts to disclose. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper. We would like to thank the financial support of National Science Foundation of China (No. 81102143).