Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI)

It is a 21-Item scale that measures the severity of anxiety in adults and adolescents. In 1998,
Aaron Beck and his associates at the center for Cognitive Therapy, University of Pennsylvania
School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, developed the BAI to assess symptoms of
anxiety.
The 1993 Edition of this manual recommends different scoring guidelines than previous
editions.

Background: Anxiety & Depression syndromes represent the most prevalent mental
disorders treated by mental health practitioners. Anxiety disorder occur in 2-5% of popullation.
The results from other instruments designed to measure the severity of anxiety and depression
are highly correlated with one another. The BAI was constructed to measure the symptoms of
anxiety which are minimally shared with those pf depression.

Development: The items of BAI were drawn from earlier self-report instruments that
measure various aspects of anxiety.
 ACL (Anxiety Check List): evaluates the severity of anxiety in depressed patients.
 PDR (Physicians Desk Reference): measures the common side effects of anti-anxiety &
anti-depressant medications.
 SAC (Situational Anxiety Checklist): measures the severity of somatic and cognitive
symptoms of anxiety in general and in context of two specific situations (1) Public
Speaking (2) another anxiety provoking situation provided by patient.

Sample: A sample of 810 outpatients of CCT was used by beck (1998) to identify an initial pool
of 86 symptoms of anxiety. Of these 86 symptoms, 20 were eliminated because the items
reflected identical or similar content. Principal-factor analysis resulted in the elimination of
additional 19 symptoms. A series of item-analysis were conducted, and 37 symptoms were
retained for further analysis.
A new sample of 116 outpatients were added, and the symptoms were further reduced to 21.

Content: It consist of 21 descriptive statements of anxiety symptoms which are rated on a 4-

point scale with the following correspondence:
 Not at all (0 Points)
 Mildly: It did not bother me much (1)
 Moderately: It was very unpleasant, but I could stand it (2)
 Severely: I could barely stand it (3)
Reliability: BAI had high internal consistency reliability (cronbach coefficient alpha= 0.92) and
fydrich found a slightly higher level of internal consistency (coefficient alpha= 0.94)

Validity: Following types of validity for BAI are considered:

Content Validity: The BAI’s Content corresponds to the symptom criteria presented in DSM-III-
R as guidelines for diagnosing patients with anxiety disorders.
Concurrent Validity: BAI is substantially related to other accepted measures of both self-
reported and clinically rated anxiety. With Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, the correlation was
0.51.
Discriminate Validity: Epstein tested the instrument’s ability to discriminate different
combinations of primary and secondary mental disorders. They reported only moderate overlap
between BAI scores of a group with a primary anxiety disorder and another group of patients
with a primary depression disorder.
Factorial Validity: BAI yielded two highly correlated dimensions in their diagnostically mixed
sample. The first factor represented somatic symptoms of anxiety, whereas second factor
represented both subjective and panic-related aspects of anxiety.

Availability: BAI is available on Pearson-Clinical with three different categories:

 Global Web-based Kit (Includes print manual, digital manual and 5 global reporting
sheets) Price= 96 $
 Local Software-based Kit ( includes manual with 25 record sheets) price= 138.25 $
 Manual Scoring Kit ( Manual & 25 record sheets) Price= 138.25 $