There are two ways to measure anxiety: self-reported and evaluations by others. Trait anxiety refers to stable individual differences in a person’s relatively long-lasting personality traits. State anxiety refers to the temporary passive state of a person, which exists immediately and has a certain level of intensity. Anxiety is further divided into state anxiety and trait anxiety. Anxiety disorder, if has not been correctly identified and treated, will not only bring spiritual pain to people, but also bring a heavy social and economic burden to the country.
Self rating anxiety scale professional#
Among individuals with anxiety disorder, only 8% had ever sought professional help and 5% had ever seen professional mental health doctors. Therefore, many people with anxiety disorder were not diagnosed and treated in time. At the beginning, it did not attract enough attention of people, who would consider whether they were suffering from anxiety disorder only when they had received repeated medical and surgical inspections and ineffective treatments. The diagnosis rate and treatment rate of anxiety disorder in China are low. As a study ( Phillips et al., 2009) published in the international authoritative medical journal The Lancet shows, based on the calculations of epidemiological data of the four provinces, including Shandong, Zhejiang, Qinghai, and Ningxia, the number of patients with anxiety disorders in China is as high as 57 million. Anxiety disorders have become a serious public health problem in China. Thus, it is not surprising that most anxiety assessment tools have been developed into clinical settings. Anxiety is a prevalent emotional disorder that interferes with psychosocial functioning ( Balestrieri et al., 2010). People with serious anxiety can also cause emotional and emotional disorders. It is an irritating emotion caused by excessive worry about the life safety of relatives or themselves, their future and fate, etc.
Finally, the three instruments were combined on a common scale by using IRT model and a conversion table was provided so as to achieve the transformation of each scale score.Īnxiety is an unpleasant state of fear and uneasiness. In conclusion, BAI shows good psychometric quality. The SAS provided less information than the other scales at all anxiety severity range. In general, the BAI showed better, for it provided more information than the other scales at the broadest range of anxiety severity. The S-AI provided more information than the other scales when the student’s scale was less than approximately 0.8 standard deviations below the mean of anxiety severity. Results showed that the BAI’s measurement error was fewer than that of the other scales, with their anxiety severity ranging approximately from the 0.8 standard deviations below the mean to 3 standard deviations above the mean, while the S-AI’s measurement error was fewer than that of the other degrees of anxiety. Although these scales were probably to measure the same underlying construct, namely, anxiety, their psychometric properties were different. Three widely-used self-report anxiety scales, including the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and the State Anxiety Inventory (S-AI), were used to simultaneously compare the psychometric properties via an item response theory (IRT) model with Chinese university students as the sample.