Elsevier

Behavior Therapy

Volume 37, Issue 4, December 2006, Pages 392-405
Behavior Therapy

The Appraisal of Social Concerns Scale: Psychometric Validation With a Clinical Sample of Patients With Social Anxiety Disorder

Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Washington, DC, November 2005
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2006.06.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The Appraisal of Social Concerns (ASC) Scale was created by Telch et al. (2004) to improve upon existing self-report measures of social anxiety–related cognition. In a largely nonclinical sample, the ASC was found to possess three factors and was psychometrically sound. In a smaller clinical sample, the ASC demonstrated sensitivity to the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy. In the present study, the psychometric properties of the ASC were examined in a larger sample of patients with social anxiety disorder. In this sample, the ASC exhibited a 2-factor structure; the nature of the factors was similar to the primary factors originally reported by Telch et al. The ASC also demonstrated strong validity, internal consistency, and sensitivity to treatment effects. It is concluded that the ASC may be useful in the assessment of cognition and cognitive change in patients with social anxiety disorder.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants included in this study were 204 treatment-seeking individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for social anxiety disorder (see below for additional information about the diagnosis of participants). Local referrals and newspaper advertisements were employed to recruit participants at the Anxiety Disorders Clinic of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY (n = 57), the Center for Stress and Anxiety Disorders of the University at Albany, State University of New York (n = 24), and

Preliminary analyses

Demographic characteristics of patients from the three collaborative sites (Albany, Philadelphia, and New York) are presented in Table 1. Comparisons across sites revealed no differences in age, gender, marital status, or education. However, there were site differences in ethnicity, as the New York sample was more racially diverse than the Albany and Philadelphia samples, which were both predominantly Caucasian. Furthermore, ethnicity was related to full-scale ASC scores, as Caucasian

Discussion

The present study is the first to examine the psychometric properties of the ASC in a large sample of patients with clinical social anxiety disorder. Data analyses were conducted to examine the nature of the ASC’s factor structure, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and sensitivity to treatment effects. Initially, a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted, which revealed a poor fit with the three-factor structure derived by Telch et al. (2004) in a nonclinical sample. Also,

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    Thomas L. Rodebaugh is now at the Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health to Richard G. Heimberg (MH44119), Michael R. Liebowitz (MH40121), to the New York State Psychiatric Institute MHCRC (PO5 MH30906), and to the Temple University General Clinical Research Center (RR00349) from NCRR:NIH.

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