The Anxiety Attitude and Belief Scale-2: Development, measurement model, and initial validity

There is a notable lack of measures of enduring beliefs, which are key etiological factors in Beck's cognitive model of anxiety. The Anxiety Attitude and Belief Scale-2 was developed to address this need. Items from the original AABS were reviewed and revised, and additional items were added to cover the range of constructs identified as reflecting anxiety related expectancies while avoiding the confounding of cognition and affect. Suitability of items was examined using cognitive interviewing (Willis, 2004). The resulting set of 48 items was administered to an index sample of individuals reporting anxiety symptoms and a cross-validation sample of undergraduate students in order to derive a measurement model describing its internal structure. The final, 33-item AABS-2 had a bifactor structure of one general and four specific factors, good fit to the data, common factor content across groups, acceptable precision in measurement, and evidence of construct validity.