ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The Questionnaire for Social Anxiety and Social Competence Deficits for Adolescents (SASKO-J) was developed as an instrument for clinical diagnostics of social anxiety disorder in youths by measuring social anxiety and social deficits in two separate dimensions. The study provides an initial assessment of the scale's psychometric properties in a clinical sample. METHOD: The reliability and validity of the SASKO-J were assessed in a mixed clinical sample of 12- to 19-year-old German adolescents (N = 85; mean age 15.71 years; SD = 1.92; 62.4 % girls). In a second step, the diagnostic validity was evaluated in a clinical sample of 31 adolescent patients with social anxiety disorder (mean age 16.10 years; SD = 1.54; 74.2 % girls) and a sample of 115 German high school students (mean age 15.84 years; SD = 1.65; 60.9 % girls) via Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. RESULTS: The internal consistencies of the total scale and the subscales were good to excellent (0.80 ≤ α ≤ 0.96), and the results indicated a good convergent and divergent validity. The ROC analysis revealed a satisfying area under curve (AUC = 0.866), and a cutoff of 41.5 for the SASKO-J total score represented the best balance of sensitivity (0.806) and specificity (0.826). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this pilot study provide initial support for the clinical use of the SASKO-J in the diagnostic process. Future research should address the question of psychometric properties in a social anxiety disorder sample as well as the questionnaire's sensitivity for detecting change in symptoms during therapy.
ABSTRACT
The aims of this study were to analyze the coping strategies used by women in the first trimester of low-risk pregnancies, their relationships to sociodemographic and pregnancy variables, and their ability to predict anxiety and depression in the third trimester. Participants in the first trimester were 285 Spanish pregnant women, of whom 122 were followed into the third trimester. The use of problem-focused coping was stable, whereas variations occurred in emotion-focused coping. Age, educational level, employment, planned pregnancy, previous childbirth, and previous miscarriage were associated with adaptive coping. Coping strategies predicting anxiety and depressive symptoms were overt emotional expression and social support seeking. Coping through religion predicted anxiety. Coping is a complex process influenced by sociodemographic and obstetric factors that can contribute to the onset of psychological symptoms.
