Reliability and validity of Turkish Form of Agoraphobia Scale

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Turkish Form of the Agoraphobia Scale. The scale was originally developed to measure the severity of agoraphobia regarding the DSM-5 criteria. Methods: This study was conducted at the Department of Psychiatry in Celal Bayar University Hospital. The participants were in-or out-patients diagnosed with any anxiety disorder according to the DSM-5. The exclusion criteria were comorbidity of other psychiatric disorders and/or physical diseases. Accordingly, 50 patients with anxiety disorder were included in the study and these were distributed as panic disorder in 14 patients, generalized anxiety disorder in 10 patients, agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder in four patients, post-traumatic stress disorder in one patient and not otherwise specified anxiety disorder in 17 patients. One hundred and three volunteers without any mental or physical disease were also included to represent the healthy control. Additionally the most widely used self-rated scale of the Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was used for concurrent validity. Reliability analysis was performed to examine the internal consistency of the Turkish version of the scale. Additionally, item-total correlations were reported. In terms of examining the validity of the scale, subgroup validity analysis was conducted to investigate whether two groups of patients differ in their scores on the scale. ROC analysis was also performed. Results: The mean age of the study group was 29.0 +/- 11.8 and 60.1% of the sample group (n=92) were female. 66.0% of the group were college graduates, 19.0% primary school graduates, 15.0% is also high school graduates. Disease duration of anxiety disorder group was 17.1 +/- 9.7 years. The internal consistency of the Agoraphobia Scale was 0.95 and, item-total score correlation coefficients of the Agoraphobia Scale were between 0.66 and 0.87. In the explanatory factor analysis, for sample adequacy Kaiser-Meier-Olkin (KMO) coefficient was 0.92 and Bartlett coefficient was 1.57. Single-factor solution was obtained and the eigenvalue was 7.16, explaining 71.68% of the total variance. Factor loadings of the items were between 0.71 and 0.90. Coefficient of Spearman correlation analysis was r=0.31. Conclusion: Results demonstrated that the Turkish version of the Agoraphobia Scale was a valid and reliable instrument which may serve as useful in guiding future research that aims to measure agoraphobia severity.