Assessing Social Anxiety in African American Youth using the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children

Excerpt

Social anxiety disorder is characterized by a persistent fear of social or performance situations in one or more areas, including public speaking, dating, and/or talking to new or unfamiliar people. Typically with an age of onset in adolescence, social anxiety is accompanied by evaluation concerns, functional impairment, and is prospectively and concurrently linked to substance use, un-employment, and dependence on the welfare system (Lipsitz and Schneier 2000; Morris et al. 2005; Tolman et al. 2009). Whereas there is ample literature about social anxiety in children and adolescents, most research has been based on White samples (Hunter and Schmidt 2010; Neal and Turner 1991). Turning to multiethnic samples, cross-ethnic comparative research based on rating scales shows that in clinical samples African American youth in particular report significantly lower (or similar) social anxiety levels than their Caucasian counterparts (e.g., Beidel et al. 2000, 1999; Ferrell et al. 2004). On average, African Americans could truly be low (or same as Caucasians) on social anxiety, but it also might be the case that measures are no adequately capturing social anxiety in African American youth. As reviewed by Pina et al. (2013), several measures have failed to provide equivalent information across ethnic groups, including for African American youth. Configural invariance in a community sample of White and African American youth, for example, was not supported for the Child Behavior Checklist (internalizing/externalizing scales; Tyson et al. 2011). Moreover, among African Americans anxiety seems to manifest itself largely in terms of physical symptoms (Neal and Turner 1991) and measures such as the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (La Greca and Lopez 1998) that do not include physiological anxiety items might be under-identifying socially anxious African American youth. Clearly, the implication is that lack of invariance can result in poor science, overpathologizing, and wasted resources. As such, it is important to investigate whether measures developed with White samples provide equivalent information about ethnic minority youth in general, including for African Americans. …