The development ofa 2 l-item self-report inventory for measuring the severity of anxiety in psychiatric populations is described. The initial item pool of 86 items was drawn from three preexisting scales: the Anxiety Checklist, the Physician's Desk Reference Checklist, and the Situational Anxiety Checklist. A series of analyses was used to reduce the item pool. The resulting Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) is a 21-item scale that showed high internal consistency (a = .92) and test-retest reliability over 1 week, r(81) = .75. The BAI discriminated anxious diagnostic groups (panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, etc.) from nonanxious diagnostic groups (major depression, dysthymic disorder, etc). In addition, the BAI was moderately correlated with the revised Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, r(150) = .51, and was only mildly correlated with the revised Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, r(l 53) = .25.
The amended (revised) Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-IA; Beck & Steer, 1993b) and the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) were self-administered to 140 psychiatric outpatients with various psychiatric disorders. The coefficient alphas of the BDI-IA and the BDI-II were, respectively, .89 and .91. The mean rating for Sadness on the BDI-IA was higher than it was on the BDI-II, but the mean ratings for Past Failure, Self-Dislike, Change in Sleeping Pattern, and Change in Appetite were higher on the BDI-II than they were on the BDI-IA. The mean BDI-II total score was approximately 2 points higher than it was for the BDI-IA, and the outpatients also endorsed approximately one more symptom on the BDI-II than they did on the BDI-IA. The correlations of BDI-IA and BDI-II total scores with sex, ethnicity, age, the diagnosis of a mood disorder, and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (Beck & Steer, 1993a) were within 1 point of each other for the same variables.
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