Internet Validation and Psychometric Evaluation of the Mini-Social Phobia Inventory (Mini-SPIN) Applied to One Clinical and Two Nonclinical Samples

Abstract: This study examined the utility of the Mini-Social Phobia Inventory (MS) as a self-report screening measure of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). It also assessed whether there were any differences in the way in which respondents used the MS and other self-report measures when administered via the internet, as compared to standard pen and paper format. Data was collected from Swedish populations, using on clinical sample (n=133) and two samples of university students (n=795). The MS demonstrated adequate concurrent, convergent and divergent validity, and satisfactory discriminative validity, with an optimal cut-off value of 3. The psychometric properties of the scale were found to be equivalent across administration formats.