مقیاس ترس از فضاهای بسته: یک روانسنجی

This article presents a psychometric evaluation of the Claustrophobia Scale (CS), consisting of one subscale for measuring anxiety (20 items, 0–4) and one for avoidance (18 items, 0–2). Participants were 87 claustrophobic patients and 200 normal controls randomly selected from the community. The results show that CS has excellent internal consistency, high test–retest reliability, concurrent and discriminant validity. The patients and controls differ significantly on the total scores of anxiety and avoidance, as well as on each individual item scores. The CS was also found to be sensitive to change after cognitive behavioral treatment. Preliminary factor analyses yielded two factors for each subscale; “Being in small enclosed spaces” and “Other people present”, accounting for large proportions of the variance. The CS is useful both as a state, and as an outcome self-report measure of claustrophobia.

Claustrophobia is classified in DSM-IV (APA, 1994) as a specific phobia under the subcategory of situational phobias, and it is one of the most prevalent specific phobias in the general population. Costello (1982) reported a prevalence of 4% in a female Canadian sample, whereas Kirkpatrick (1984) in a mixed US sample found a much higher figure of 13.4%. Chapman (1997) reviewed the ECA-study and found the following proportrions fulfilling DSM-III criteria for enclosed spaces: 2.4%, for tunnels: 2.1%, and for crowds: 2.6% (probably with significant overlap between situations). Finally, the National Co-morbidity Study (Curtis, Magee, Eaton, Wittchen, & Kessler, 1998) reported a lifetime prevalence of 4.2%, placing claustrophobia in third place after animal phobia (5.7%) and acrophobia (5.3%). Thus, except for the Kirkpatrick (1984) study the different studies seem to agree that the lifetime prevalence is claustrophobia is about 4%.