The Validity and Reliability of Turkish Version of Separation Anxiety Symptoms Inventory (SASI), Adult Separation Anxiety Questionnaire (ASA), and Structured Clinical Interview For Separation Anxiety Symptoms (SCI-SAS)

Aim: Separation anxiety is defined as a distress upon separation or anticipation of separation from one?s mother or another basic attachment figure. Recently it has been showed that the core symptoms of separation anxiety might persist or even arise during adulthood. The aim of this study is to assess the validity and reliability of 1) Separation Anxiety Symptoms Inventory (SASI) that assess childhood separation anxiety retrospectively 2) Adult Separation Anxiety Questionnaire (ASA) and 3) Structured Clinical Interview (SCI-SAS) in order to make a diagnosis of adult separation anxiety in both Turkish psychiatric patients and healthy controlsMethod: The study sample included a group of 410 participants comprised of 282 adult psychiatric outpatients with Axis I anxiety and/or major depressive disorders according to DSM-IV criteria and 128 non-psychiatric control subjects. The presence or absence of a psychiatric disorder was determined by using the M.I.N.I. (Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview) in all the subjects in the study. Structured Clinical Interview for Separation Anxiety Symptoms (SCI-SAS), Separation Anxiety Symptoms Inventory (SASI), Adult Separation Anxiety Questionnaire (ASA), Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS), Panic Agorapfobic Spectrum Scale (PAS-SR), Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI) and a sociodemographic data form were also applied.Findings: The validity assessments of the instruments revealed that all the three measures have discriminated the psychiatric patients from the healthy controls. It has been showed that all these measures were highly intercorrelated with each other. They have been also found to have a high correlation with PAS-SR and a moderate correlation with ASI. The factor structure assessments revealed the existence of some factor structures; which were 3 factors for SCI-SAS-childhood, 2 for SCI-SAS-adulthood, 3 for SASI and 5 for ASA. It has been shown that SCI-SAS has a moderate level of internal concistency (Cronbach alfa coefficients are 0.57 for the childhood and 0.59 for the adulthood subscales). All the items in both subscales of the SCI-SAS has been found to have a moderate consistency with the instrument and also they have a good test-retest and inter-rater reliability. Both SASI and ASA has a high level of internal consistency (Cronbach alfa coefficients are 0.89 and 0.93, respectively), their total-item score correlations are also high, and their test-retest reliability is fairly good.Results: All the instruments that have been investigated in this study -a structured clinical interview and two severity scales regarding separation anxiety in childhood and adulthood- were found to have good psychometric properties, including a good internal consistency and construct validity. Results indicate that those instruments can be used in clinical studies both diagnosing adult separation anxiety disorder and to determining its severity.Keywords: Adult separation anixety, Adult Separation Anxiety Questionnaire, Separation Anxiety Symptoms Inventory, Structured Clinical Interview for the Symptoms of Separation Anxiety.