Measurement invariance of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory

The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) is a commonly used self-report measure of social phobia that has demonstrated adequate reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity. However, research has yet to address whether this measure functions equivalently in (a) individuals with and without a diagnosis of social phobia and (b) males and females. Evaluating measurement equivalence/invariance is necessary in order to determine that the construct of social anxiety is interpreted similarly across these populations. The results of the current investigation, using a series of nested factorial models proposed by Vandenberg and Lance (2000), provide evidence for strong equivalence across 420 individuals with and without diagnoses of social phobia and across male and female samples. Accordingly, these results provide psychometric justification for comparison of SPAI scores across the symptom continuum and sexes.