Development and validation of the penn state worry questionnaire

The present report describes the development of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire to measure the trait of worry. The 16-item instrument emerged from factor analysis of a large number of items and was found to possess high internal consistency and good test-retest reliability. The questionnaire corr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behaviour research and therapy 1990, Vol.28 (6), p.487-495
Main Authors: Meyer, T.J., Miller, M.L., Metzger, R.L., Borkovec, Thomas D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Anxiety Disorders - diagnosis
Anxiety Disorders - psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Female
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Nosology. Terminology. Diagnostic criteria
Personality Inventory
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychometrics
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Questionnaires
Reproducibility of Results
Social psychology
Social research
Techniques and methods
Worry
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The present report describes the development of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire to measure the trait of worry. The 16-item instrument emerged from factor analysis of a large number of items and was found to possess high internal consistency and good test-retest reliability. The questionnaire correlates predictably with several psychological measures reasonably related to worry, and does not correlate with other measures more remote to the construct. Responses to the questionnaire are not influenced by social desirability. The measure was found to significantly discriminate college samples (a) who met all, some, or none of the DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder and (b) who met criteria for GAD vs posttraumatic stress disorder. Among 34 GAD-diagnosed clinical subjects, the worry questionnaire was found not to correlate with other measures of anxiety or depression, indicating that it is tapping an independent construct with severely anxious individuals, and coping desensitization plus cognitive therapy was found to produce significantly greater reductions in the measure than did a nondirective therapy condition.
ISSN:0005-7967
1873-622X
DOI:10.1016/0005-7967(90)90135-6