Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

An Adaptation of the Questionnaire for Social Anxiety and Social Competence Deficits (SASKO) for Adolescents and its Evaluation in a German Student Sample

¹Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Georg-August-University of Göttingen; Goßlerstraße 14, 37073 Göttingen, Germany

²MSH Medical School Hamburg, University of Applied Sciences and Medical University; Am Kaiserkai 1, 20457 Hamburg, Germany

³Klinikum Nürnberg; Prof.-Ernst-Nathan-Straße 1, 90419 Nürnberg, Germany

*Corresponding Author:

Carolin Fernandez Castelao
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy
Georg-August-University of Göttingen; Goßlerstraße 14
37073 Göttingen, Germany
Tel: +49551394159
Fax: +495513933544
E-mail: c.fernandezcastelao@psych.uni-goettingen.de

Received Date: November 20, 2014; Accepted Date: December 28, 2014; Published Date: December 31, 2014

Citation: Castelao CF, Ruhl U, Janßen A, Kolbeck S, Kröner-Herwig B et al (2014) An Adaptation of the Questionnaire for Social Anxiety and Social Competence Deficits (SASKO) for Adolescents and its Evaluation in a German Student Sample. J Child Adolesc Behav 2:174. doi:10.4172/2375-4494.1000174

Copyright: © 2014 Carolin Fernandez Castela, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

In the diagnostics of social phobia in adults the SASKO self-report questionnaire serves as an instrument that measures social anxiety and social deficits as two separate dimensions. This paper describes the development of an adaptation of the SASKO for adolescents (SASKO-J) and verifies its applicability, factor structure, and psychometric properties. The factor structure and reliability of the SASKO-J were evaluated in an unselected sample of 228 German students from grades 7 to 11 (M = 14.77 years, SD = 1.33; 50% girls). In a second sample of 115 students the validity was examined (M = 15.84, SD = 1.65; 61% girls). Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the five-factor structure of the SASKO (two anxiety and two deficit related factors and an additional factor “loneliness”). With the exception of the subscale “information-processing deficits”, the internal consistencies were satisfactory to good (0.77≤α≤0.88). The results regarding convergent and divergent validity were also good. Students from different types of school differed in their levels of social anxiety, girls reported significantly more fear of rejection than boys, and the youngest students had the highest level of symptoms. Future research should address the optimizing of the subscale “information-processing deficits” and should examine the psychometric properties of the SASKO-J in a clinical sample.

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