Assessment of social phobia by the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale and the Social Phobia Scale

The psychometric properties of a German version or the Social Interaction A nxiety Scale and thr Social Phobia Scale (Mattick & Clarke. 1989) were eval uated in 43 social phobics. 60 patients with other disorders. and 24 normal controls. Internal consistency and retest reliability were very good and c omparable to the original versions. Bot scales showed high convergent valid ity as indicated by high correlations with other measures of social phobia. Lower correlations were observed with depression and anxiety measures. Soc ial phobics were significantly discriminated from normal controls as well a s patients with other anxiety disorders and depression, but not from patien ts with mixed anxiety and depression cut-off scores were significantly lowe r than obtained with original versions and need further examination. To sum up, our results indicate that both scales are useful as reliable and speci fic screening instruments tor social phobia.