Description

The PROMIS Anxiety Short Form is an 8-item anxiety screening tool asks respondents to rate how often they feel anxiety symptoms in the past 7 days. Items focus on feeling fearful, anxious, worried, nervous, uneasy, tense, and unable to focus on anything other than anxiety. The more often anxiety symptoms are experienced by the respondent and the more anxiety symptoms they experience in general, the higher the risk for an anxiety disorder.

AI/AN Communities where the measure has been used

Southwest tribal communities; Upper Midwest.

Demographics of AI/AN participants where the scale has been used

Women ages 14+ with young children; youth ages 14-30 at risk of suicide.

Notes on adaptations or modifications

N/A

Modality and administration

Self-report; Participants are handed a tablet, or pen and paper, or otherwise sent a link to a REDCap survey.

Scoring

Each question has five response options ranging in value from one to five: 0) 0 days; 1) 1-2 days; 2) 3-4 days; 3) 5-6 days; 4) All 7 days. To find the total raw score, sum the values of the response to each question. For the adult 8-item form, the lowest possible raw score is 8; the highest possible raw score is 40. Any score 17 and above (2.125 average score) is considered high risk.

Psychometric evidence

The Cronbach’s alpha for anxiety items is reported at 0.98, showcasing an extremely high level of internal consistency across the items measuring this construct. This suggests that the items in the anxiety scale are highly correlated and consistently assess the concept of anxiety within the PROMIS framework.

Summed scores of the 56 items to 277 for anxiety (an average score of 4.9 per item or an answer of “always” to almost all items, α=.98. Pg.8 (Pilkonis et al., 2011).

Citation(s)

  • Pilkonis, P. A., Choi, S. W., Reise, S. P., Stover, A. M., Riley, W. T., Cella, D., & PROMIS Cooperative Group. (2011). Item banks for Measuring Emotional Distress from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®): Depression, Anxiety, and Anger. Assessment, 18(3), 263–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191111411667 
  • O’Keefe, V.M., Haroz, E.E., Goklish, N.et al. Employing a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) to evaluate the impact of brief risk and protective factor prevention interventions for American Indian Youth Suicide. BMC Public Health 19, 1675 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7996-2
  • O’Keefe VM, Grubin F, Vaidya N, Maudrie TL, Conrad M, Neuner S, Jridi S, Cook MA, Carson KA, Barlow A, Haroz EE. Pilot evaluation of a Psychological First Aid online training for COVID-19 frontline workers in American Indian/Alaska Native communities. Front Public Health. 2024 Jun 27; 12:1346682. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1346682. PMID: 39005986; PMCID: PMC11240286.