Reliability And Validity Of Beck Anxiety Inventory(BAI)in Chinese Postgraduates

Anxiety is a common affective disorder.Mild anxiety is common among people and moderate anxiety has certain promoting effects on one’s study and work.But if anxiety is beyond a certain limit,it can lead to mental illness.The postgraduate students are a group of people who have high education background and rich knowledge and the society has high expectations and requirements of them.Because of this,they are under great mental and academic pressure.In recent years,China has deepened its high education reform and the enrollment scale of graduate students has expanded increasingly.Nowadays,Chinese postgraduates are facing enormous academic and employment pressure.They need to work overtime because of huge learning tasks and limited employment resources.They feel tired more often,more likely to be anxious and their mental health is more worrying.Beck Anxiety Inventory(BAI)is a widely used screening instrument for measuring anxiety disorders.BAI had a total of 21 self-reported items and could effectively distinguish anxiety diagnostic symptoms.However,little information to date is available on the applicability,reliability,and validity of BAI in Chinese postgraduates,who were high-risk to be anxiety and under special high stress.In addition,no confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)has been employed to compare different theory-driven models and evaluated how well they fit in China.This study assessed the reliability,and validity of the Chinese version of BAI in Chinese postgraduates.Participants include 531 postgraduate students in six universities in Nanjing.Cronbach’s alpha in classical test theory is used to evaluate the reliability of the Chinese version of BAI.Factor analysis is employed to assess the validity of BAI.To be specific,Exploratory Factor Analysis(EFA)is performed to identify the potential factor structure of BAI.Confirmatory Factor Analysis(CFA)models obtained from previous studies and EFA is referred to for model fit.The results indicate that the Chinese version of BAI has satisfactory reliability and validity.All seven competing models of BAI are well-fitted with the actual data.And among these,the four-factor structure models,especially the one proposed by Wetherell and Arean yields the best fit.It’s important to pay urgent attention to the mental health,especially anxiety in Chinese postgraduates.And BAI is appropriate for student group,which can be used as a good screener to detect anxiety disorders of Chinese people.