Adaptation of the Visual Social Anxiety Scale to Turkish culture: Reliability and validity analysis

Social anxiety is a common human experience characterized by an intense fear of being evaluated by others in social situations. When it reaches a level severe enough to impair functioning, it is called social anxiety disorder or social phobia. Often the person knows that the fear is excessive or meaningless. It may be accompanied by physical symptoms such as trembling, flushing and sweating. Despite these symptoms in daily life and the resulting social and economic losses, patients with social anxiety disorder have been found to show help-seeking behavior less frequently than patients with other anxiety disorders. Massad et al. in their article in which they created the Visual Social Anxiety Scale, stated that written scales may have poor validity in participants with low literacy levels, individuals may be likely to interpret the question statements in their own way, and scale translations may be imperfect due to linguistic and cultural differences. For all these reasons, they pointed out that verbal scales have some weaknesses in measuring what they aim to measure, but using pictures in measurements makes it easier to sort, understand and communicate large amounts of information quickly and efficiently. In Turkish, the Mind Reading from Eyes Test adapted by Yıldırım et al. is used as a sample test consisting of visuals and measures people's emotion reading skills. The aim of this study is to adapt the Visual Social Anxiety Scale developed by Massad et al. to Turkish culture and to test its psychometric properties in order to contribute to social anxiety research and clinical detection studies in Turkey. A total of 275 adults living in Turkey participated in the study. Analyses were conducted with SPSS 25.00. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted for construct validity tests. Exploratory factor analysis revealed 13 factors in the scale. Therefore, it was concluded that there was only one factor in the scale and a total score could be obtained. For convergent validity, it shows a high level of positive significance with the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale and Social Thoughts Scale, which are used to distinguish social anxiety in clinical settings. For divergent validity, although it showed a significant correlation with the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, the correlation coefficient was lower than the other social anxiety scales. For the reliability analysis, the total score Cronbach Alpha internal consistency value of the scale was .959. With the prediction that visual scales will make a difference in measuring the real reports of the participants in today's digitalized world, the adaptation of the Visual Social Anxiety Scale to Turkish culture and validity and reliability studies were conducted in this study. The psychometric values of the scale were found to be adequate.