| Summary: | Social phobia, a debilitating disorder among children and adolescents, is thought to be made up of cognitive, behavioral, and physiological components. However, in children, the cognitive component of this disorder has been largely neglected by researchers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to create and validate a new instrument, the "Socially Oriented Negative Anxious Statement (SONAS) scale, that assesses socially oriented negative self-referent cognition in a younger population. Measurement validation procedures including, reliability, validity, and factor analysis, were utilized to examine the proposed questionnaire. Results indicated that the SONAS scale demonstrated good psychometric properties, including a sound two-factor structure (i.e., performance thoughts and interaction thoughts) as expected, good internal consistency for each subscale and the total scale, moderate to strong correlations with similar constructs (e.g., the NASSQ, the social threat subscale of the CATS), and weak correlations with differing constructs (e.g., the hostility subscale of the CATS). The newly developed instrument also demonstrated good concurrent validity, predicting the amount of social anxiety present as measured by two different scales (i.e., a brief social anxiety questionnaire and the SPAI-C). Collectively, it is thought that the SONAS scale is an important new tool in the assessment of negative cognition in social anxiety that may be used for the development of predictive theoretical models as well as for assessment and progress monitoring within the context of treatment (e.g., CBT). Implications and study limitations are discussed.
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