Beck Anxiety Inventory

 (BAI)

Purpose: Designed to discriminate anxiety from depression in individuals.

Population: Adults.

Score: Yields a total score

Time: (5-10) minutes.

Author: Aaron T. Beck.

Publisher: The Psychological Corporation.

Description: The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) was created in response to the need for a test that could validly and consistently distinguish between anxiety and depression. For clinical and scientific reasons, such a tool would be preferable to currently used self-report measures, which have not been proved to adequately distinguish between anxiety and depression.

Scoring: There are 21 items on the scale, each of which describes a typical anxiety symptom. On a scale of 0 to 3, the respondent is asked to rate how much each symptom has troubled them over the last week. A total score is calculated from the items and can range from 0 to 63.

Reliability: High internal consistency and item-total correlations ranging from.30 to.71 (median=.60) were obtained for the scale's reliability. One week later, a subset of patients (n=83) completed the BAI, and the correlation between the BAI scores at intake and the 1-week BAI scores was.75.

Validity: There were substantial associations between the BAI and a number of self-report and clinician-rated scales. The BAI and the HARS-R and HRSD-R had correlations of.51 and.25, respectively. The BAI and BDI have a correlation of.48. Three investigations were used to determine the convergent and discriminant validity to distinguish between homogeneous and heterogeneous diagnostic groupings. The outcomes support the existence of these validity.

Norms: The three psychiatric outpatient normative samples were taken from sequential routine evaluations at the Center for Cognitive Therapy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The sample size was 1,086 in total. There were 630 females and 456 males.

Recommended for use in clinical and research settings to measure anxiety.