Summary: The purpose of this study was to develop a self-report questionnaire for the assessment of social anxiety in adults. The Inventory of Interpersonal Situations (IIS) consists of 35 items formulated as responses to specific social situations. The IIS is based on an interactive concept of social anxiety and provides scores for both a Discomfort and a Frequency scale. The reliability and validity of the IIS were investigated in several adult psychiatric and nonpsychiatric samples. The scales for Discomfort and Frequency showed stability over time. Cronbach's α's revealed a sufficiently high internal consistency on both scales, while the conceptual structure was shown to be rather invariant across socially anxious and nonsocially anxious groups. The IIS scales were able to discriminate between socially anxious and nonsocially anxious samples, and showed significant relationships with independent measures of social anxiety. The IIS scales demonstrated high predictive validity for overt behavior in social situations.
The present study investigates whether empirical data support the notion that people in Western societies do not differ with regard to social anxiety. Social anxiety in Dutch students (N = 425) was compared with that experienced by students in the United States (N = 440) and Turkey (N = 349). Social anxiety was operationalized with the Inventory of Interpersonal Situations (IIS; Van Dam-Baggen & Kraaimaat, 1987, 1999, 2000), which measures two aspects of social anxiety, i.e., discomfort in social situations and frequency of social responses. The original Dutch version of the IIS (IOA) was translated into a U.S. English version (the IIS) and a Turkish version (KADE). First, it was shown that the American, Dutch, and Turkish versions of the IIS measured the same construct in terms of factor structure. Second, American students generally appeared more socially anxious than did the Dutch and Turkish students, whereas the latter's social anxiety slightly surpassed that of Dutch subjects. The American students also showed fewer social skills than both other groups, who did not differ in this respect. The results are somewhat more differentiated with respect to the domains of social anxiety, and they are discussed in terms of cross-cultural differences and their implications for clinical practice.
Social anxiety among 110 stutterers was compared with the measures of two control groups (110 social phobic patients and 110 normal persons). Results do not support the notion of social anxiety as an essential part of stuttering.
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