DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF MEASURES OF SOCIAL PHOBIA SCRUTINY FEARAND SOCIAL-INTERACTION ANXIETY

The development and validation of the Social Phobia Scale (SPS) and th e Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) two companion measures for a ssessing social phobia fears is described. The SPS assesses fears of b eing scrutinised during routine activities (eating, drinking, writing, etc.), while the SIAS assesses fears of more general social interacti on, the scales corresponding to the DSM-III-R descriptions of Social P hobia-Circumscribed and Generalised types, respectively. Both scales w ere shown to possess high levels of internal consistency and test-rete st reliability. They discriminated between social phobia, agoraphobia and simple phobia samples, and between social phobia and normal sample s. The scales correlated well with established measures of social anxi ety, but were found to have low or non-significant (partial) correlati ons with established measures of depression, state and trait anxiety, locus of control, and social desirability. The scales were found to ch ange with treatment and to remain stable in the face of no-treatment. It appears that these scales are valid, useful, and easily scored meas ures for clinical and research applications, and that they represent a n improvement over existing measures of social phobia. (C) 1998 Publis hed by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.