Utility of fear survey schedule with Australian samples of anxiety disorder patients.

The Fear Survey Schedule (FSS) has been widely used in clinical settings for the assessment of anxiety disorders yet its reliability and validity is still in doubt. This paper reports the factor structure and the validity of the FSS using 130 agoraphobics with panic attacks, 98 phobics and 108 non-patient controls. The results show that a clear 6-factor solution can be derived from the FSS and this accounts for 46% of the variance. The 6 factors are (1) agoraphobia, (2) fear of small animals, (3) social anxiety, (4) negative social evaluation fears, (5) fear of bodily harm and (6) injury and fear of social interaction. The results of discriminate analysis show the following factors, that agoraphobics differ from phobics on agoraphobia, negative evaluations, fear of bodily harm and injury and social interaction fears. Compared with the non-patient group, agoraphobics differ in all factors except the small animal fear. The findings suggest that the FSS is a very robust and valid instrument for measuring fear in anxiety disorder patients.