Measuring social anxiety utilizing role-play.

Abstract

Research on behavioral assessments which analogue have produced contradictory results. The assessment of social anxiety by such methods has been particularly laden with inconsistencies. In the present study, twenty-two male and thirty-three female undergraduate students were used to examine the interrelationship between two self-report and two behavioral measures of anxiety and a measure of social desirability. The behavioral ratings were made by two sets of independent raters from videotapes of suoject9 responses to Zuroff and Schwarz's (1978) Situation Test. The Situation Test requires subjects to place themselves imaginatively in a series of anxiety-producing situations described o~ a tape recording; their task is to respond to a line of dialogue given on the tape. The videotapes of subject's responses were scored using a checklist of behavioral anxiety indicators and a global rating scale, both developed by Zuroff and Schwarz (1978). These ratings were correlated with the two self-report measures of anxiety. The self-report measures used in the study were the S-R Inventory of Anxiousness (Endler, Hunt & Rosenstein. 1962) and the Adjective Check List (Zuckerman, 1960). Subjects were also required to fill out the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe 1960). Interrater reliabilities for the global ratings were moderate (r-.49) and high for the behavioral checklist Cr=.88). The results indicated that the checklist scores were unrelated to the global ratings or to the self-report measures of anxiety. The global ratings were also found to be unrelated to the self-report anxiety measures. However, the two self-report measures were found to be moderately correlated with each other. There were no significant relationships between any of the anxiety measures and Marlowe-Crowne social desirability.