The psychometric properties of a spanish version of the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) in a university students sample

The present study examined the psychometric properties of a Spanish version of the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) in a sample of 590 Spanish university students. The BAI demonstrated a high level of internal consistency (α= 0,88), and the factor analyses revealed a general anxiety dimension composed of two highly interrelated factors, corresponding to somatic and affective- cognitive symptoms. Taking the DSM-IV as standard the content validity of the BAI was adequate since, its items covered 45% of the specific symptomatic criteria of anxiety disorders and 78% of the symptoms of panic attacks. The BAI was correlated 0,58 with the Beck Depression Inventory-II, but a combined factor analysis of their items revealed two distinct factors, suggesting that the correlation between the BAI and BAI-II is a reflection of the relationship between anxiety and depression constructs rather than a problem of discriminant validity. Criterion validity analyses concerning the Quick DIS-III-R structured interview pointed out that the BAI had a good discriminative ability to identify clinical anxiety in university student samples. Finally, norms scores for university students were provided from the total sample and from the male and female subsamples, since females scored higher than males.