A study on the reliability and validity of Leary's social anxiety scale

The Interaction and Audience Anxiousness Scale (I-AA scale) drawn up by Leary is a measure of subjective social anxiety. This is a 27-item scale that is composed of two sub-scales, interaction anxiety scale and audience anxiety scale. Leary has hypothesized that higher interaction anxiety could be observed in the condition of continget social setting and audience anxiety might be sensitive in the condition of no contingent situation. The purpose of this study was to examin the factorial structure of I-AA scale. This five point scale quetionnaire was administrated to 405 university students, and analyzed by factor analysis and item selection. Tree diffrent factors were extracted against our expectation that Leary's scale might be constructed by two factors. Each factor was regarded as interaction anxiety factor (F-1), ill-fitting factor on Leary's hypothesis (F-2) and audience anxiety factor (F-3). From this result, we proposed to restruct Leary's social anxiety scale in order to assess more previously the two different aspects on social anxiety. The short from scale (revised I-AA scale) consisting of 14 items was finally constructed by means of item selection. The factorial validity and reliability of the scale were confirmed