Application of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) to an elderly population

The goal of this paper is to analyze psychometric properties of a Spanish version of Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) adapted for elderly people. All items were presented in a positive form to avoid problems in their understanding. Sample was of 97 older persons, selected by randomized sampling from census of an urban locality. PSWQ was originally conceived as an unidimensional questionnaire for assessing trait-worry or a general tendency to worry. The version used here, adapted for elderly people, also works unidimensionally, although those five items that were reversed respect to original PSWQ have lower saturation in the component extracted. So, it might be recommended to reduce the size of the questionnaire. PSWQ presented high sensibility and specificity to identify Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), but there is not enough evidence for its discriminating capacity between GAD and Depression. Moreover, PSWQ had high internal consistency and significant and moderately high correlations with questionnaires assessing closely related constructs, such as contents of worry, trait-anxiety or depression.