Validity of an electronic content-analysis instrument for anxiety measurement - The Dresden Anxiety Dictionary

Content analysis has a long history in clinical psychological research. Rec ently, it regains attention because of rapid technological developments in the field of data processing. This article introduces the Dresden Anxiety D ictionary (DAW), a German computerised version of the Gottschalk-Gleser anx iety scales. In the present study the validity of this new method was asses sed. Measures of trait and state anxiety were administered to 60 subjects a nd speech samples were obtained. The DAW presented a good validity showing high correlations with conventionally derived Gottschalk-Gleser scores. The DAW showed also substantial correlations with another content analytic met hod, the Affective Dictionary Ulm (ADU). We found evidence that content ana lytic anxiety measures differ in their measurement construct from self-desc riptive questionnaires (BAI and STAI) which is consistent with previous res earch findings.