Assessing Validity and Reliability of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C) in a Sample of Egyptian School Children

The purpose of the present study was to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C), an instrument developed in the United States and applied to a sample of Egypt schoolchildren. The process included the translation of the original material from English into Arabic by the second author . The study was performed using a cross-sectional design and the Arabic version of the SPAIC was applied to a sample of 1000 4th to 6th graders attending public schools in Kafr El Sheikh governorate , Egypt . one hundred subjects were excluded due to an incomplete questionnaire . The final sample consisted of 900 children, 400 girls and 500 boys , ranging in age from 10 to 12 years. The Pearson product-moment correlation showed that the two-week test-retest reliability coefficient was r = 0.820 . The factor structure was almost similar to that reported in previous studies. The results regarding the test-retest reliability and the factor structure were similar to the findings obtained in studies performed on English speaking children. The present study showed that the Arabic language version of SPAI-C is a reliable and valid measure of social anxiety for Egyptian school children