Self-Reported Acceptance of Social Anxiety Symptoms: Development and Validation of the Social Anxiety - Acceptance and Action Questionnaire

Mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions have been used in social anxiety treatments with initial success. Further research requires the psychometrically sound measurement of mechanisms of change associated with these treatments. This research was conducted to develop and evaluate such a measure, the Social Anxiety – Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (SA-AAQ) which was created to assess acceptance specific to social anxiety symptoms. The results indicated that the SA-AAQ has good internal consistency and good convergent and divergent validity. Findings suggest that the SA-AAQ is a psychometrically sound instrument proposed to measure acceptance of social anxiety symptoms, a potential mechanism of change in mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions for social anxiety.