(PS3-D96) The Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire (BIQ): Psychometric Properties in a Clinical Sample of Hispanic Children and Adolescents

Objective: There is a longstanding underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minority groups in psychological measurement development and validation. As a result, the generalizability of findings and appropriateness of measures for use with diverse populations remains largely unestablished. Hispanic children and adolescents, for instance, experience anxiety disorders at higher rates than other ethnic groups. A well-established risk factor for anxiety disorders in children and adolescents is behavioral inhibition, often measured with the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire (BIQ). The present study is the first to evaluate the BIQ as a parent report of childhood behavioral inhibition in a clinic-referred sample of predominately Hispanic youth.

Method: Participants were 435 parents (95.5% mothers) of a clinic-referred youth sample, ages 5-18 years old (M = 10.25, SD = 2.99, 96.3% Hispanic/Latino). We first evaluated the factor structure of the BIQ. We tested four factor models previously tested in the literature (i.e. single factor; 2 correlated factors = social novelty domain and situational novelty domain; 3 correlated factors = social novelty domain, situational novelty domain, and physical challenges; and 6 correlated factors = adults, peers, performance, separation, new situations, and physical challenges). Finally, we evaluated the concurrent validity of scores on the BIQ by examining the associations between BIQ scores from the best-fitting model and measures of anxiety symptom severity on the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED), a commonly used measure of childhood anxiety. With an established validity of the BIQ as correlated with the SCARED.

Results: The 6 correlated factor model provides the best fit to the data. Invariance across age and gender was supported. We found statistically significant correlations between scores on all six subscales (factors) of the BIQ and scores on SCARED-CP, all rs > .10, all ps < .05. 



Conclusions: These findings support the validity of the BIQ in assessing social anxiety symptoms in a Hispanic/Latino sample. As such, they represent a promising step toward facilitating the testing of theoretical models of the role of behavioral inhibition in anxiety among Hispanic youth.