The Portuguese language version of social phobia and Anxiety Inventory: analysis of items and internal consistency in a Brazilian sample of 1,014 undergraduate students

objective: theoretical and empirical analysis of items and internal consistency of the portuguese-language version of social phobia and anxiety inventory (spai-portuguese). methods: social phobia experts conducted a 45-item content analysis of the spai-portuguese administered to a sample of 1,014 university students. item discrimination was evaluated by student's t test; interitem, mean and item-to-total correlations, by pearson coefficient; reliability was estimated by cronbach's alpha. results: there was 100% agreement among experts concerning the 45 items. on the spai-portuguese 43 items were discriminative (p < 0.05). a few inter-item correlations between both subscales were below 0.2. the mean inter-item correlations were: 0.41 on social phobia subscale; 0.32 on agoraphobia subscale and 0.32 on the spai-portuguese. item-to-total correlations were all higher then 0.3 (p < 0.001). cronbach's alphas were: 0.95 on the spai-portuguese; 0.96 on social phobia subscale; 0.85 on agoraphobia subscale. conclusion: the 45-item content analysis revealed appropriateness concerning the underlying construct of the spai-portuguese (social phobia, agoraphobia) with good discriminative capacity on 43 items. the mean inter-item correlations and reliability coefficients demonstrated the spai-portuguese and subscales internal consistency and multidimensionality. no item was suppressed in the spai-portuguese but the authors suggest that a shortened spai, in its different versions, could be an even more useful tool for research settings in social phobia.