DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALE OF ANXIETY

This paper describes the development of a new self-report anxiety scale. The multidimensional conception of anxiety was used to create a comprehensive self-rated instrument. The study included 694 subjects from three populations: anxiety patients, medical patients, and university employees (controls). Strict selection of criteria was used, including content analysis, factor analysis, and a recently developed multitrait analysis to choose items for the scale from an item pool constructed from most of the known anxiety inventories. The 40-item scale consisted of four major dimensions and nine subscales. The total scale had internal consistency of 0.93 and close to 0.8 for separate dimensions. The scale correlated, as hypothesized, with several validating instruments (Zung Anxiety Scale and others). The analysis revealed the multidimensional and multifactorial structure of self reports of anxiety. More research is needed to further explore the validity and the usefulness of the new scale in biological and social experiments. © 1990.