A new inventory to assess childhood social anxiety and phobia: The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children.

Abstract

The development, reliability, and validity of a new instrument, the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C), is described. The results indicate that the SPAI-C has high test-retest reliability and internal consistency. In addition, an assessment of concurrent and external validity indicates statistically significant correlations with commonly used self-report measures of general anxiety and fears and parental reports of children's anxiety and social competence. The results of a factor analysis indicate that the scale consists of three factors: Assertiveness/ General Conversation, Traditional Social Encounters, and Public Performance. Finally, scores on the SPAI-C successfully differentiate socially anxious and non-socially-anxious children. The instrument appears to be a reliable and valid measure for childhood social anxiety and fear and may prove useful for improving clinical assessment and documenting treatment outcome.

Racial/Ethnic Differences in Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in Adolescents

“…Social phobia was assessed using the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C; Beidel et al 1995). The SPAI-C is a 26-item measure that assesses distress in social situations as manifested by cognitive, somatic, and behavioral symptoms of anxiety.…”

“…This scale assesses social anxiety across three domains: assertiveness/general conversation, traditional social encounters, and public performance. The SPAI-C has excellent test-retest reliability across short (two-weeks) and long (10 months) intervals, high internal consistency, and successfully differentiates socially anxious children from those without a disorder and those with externalizing disorders (Beidel et al 1995;, as well as from children with other anxiety disorders. The SPAI-C also demonstrates good convergent validity (Beidel et al 1995), and the measure has also been found to be reliable and valid in an adolescent sample (Storch et al 2004).…”

“…The SPAI-C has excellent test-retest reliability across short (two-weeks) and long (10 months) intervals, high internal consistency, and successfully differentiates socially anxious children from those without a disorder and those with externalizing disorders (Beidel et al 1995;, as well as from children with other anxiety disorders. The SPAI-C also demonstrates good convergent validity (Beidel et al 1995), and the measure has also been found to be reliable and valid in an adolescent sample (Storch et al 2004). The SPAI-C has also been demonstrated to be sensitive to changes in symptoms following treatment for social phobia (Beidel et al 2000).…”

“…The social anxiety scale of the MASC will not be reported in these analyses given that a more comprehensive measure of social anxiety was included in the study (see SPAI-C below). Social phobia was assessed using the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C;Beidel et al 1995). The SPAI-C is a 26-item measure that assesses distress in social situations as manifested by cognitive, somatic, and behavioral symptoms of anxiety.…”

An Evaluation of the Applicability of the Tripartite Constructs to Social Anxiety in Adolescents

“…In the present investigation, the SPAI-C evidenced excellent internal consistency ( = .97). Several studies support the suggested cutoff score of 18 to reliably differentiate socially anxious and non-socially anxious children (Beidel et al, 1995;Beidel, Turner, & Morris, 1998) and to differentiate children with social phobia from children with other anxiety disorders (Beidel, Turner, Hamlin, & Morris, 2000). Inderbitzen-Nolan and colleagues (2004) found that the specificity of the SPAI-C was quite high (82.7%), and the sensitivity was 61.5%.…”