Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 2003, 31, 291–311 Printed in the United Kingdom DOI: 10.1017/S1352465803003059 ASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL PHOBIA BY SELF-REPORT QUESTIONNAIRES: THE SOCIAL INTERACTION AND PERFORMANCE ANXIETY AND AVOIDANCE SCALE AND THE SOCIAL PHOBIA SAFETY BEHAVIOURS SCALE Jose ´ Pinto-Gouveia, Marina Isabel Cunha and Maria do Ce ´u Salvador Coimbra University Hospital, Portugal Abstract. The present study presents the development and validation of the Social Interac- tion and Performance Anxiety and Avoidance Scale (SIPAAS), a self-report questionnaire to assess the level of distress and avoidance in a wide range of performance and social interaction situations, and the Social Phobia Safety Behaviours Scale (SPSBS), a self-report questionnaire designed to evaluate in-situation safety behaviours in which social phobics engage to try to prevent social catastrophe. The psychometric adequacy of both scales was evaluated in three different samples: social phobic patients, other anxiety disordered patients, and normal population. Both scales were normally distributed and were shown to possess high levels of internal consistency and temporal stability. They reliably discriminate patients with generalized social phobia from patients with non-generalized social phobia, other anxiety disordered patients, and normal population. Both subscales of the SIPAAS have shown high correlations with other measures of social anxiety (SAD, FNE), whereas the SPSBS has shown low to moderate correlations with SAD and FNE. It appears that these new self-report scales are reliable, valid and useful measures of social phobia for clinical and research purposes. Keywords: Social phobia, assessment by self-report questionnaires, feared situations, safety behaviours, cognitive therapy. Introduction The practice of cognitive behaviour therapy with social phobics requires an integrated assessment of feared social interaction and performance situations, in-situation safety behaviours and beliefs about the self and about others. Nevertheless, very few self-report questionnaires in social phobia assessment are able to assess the vast range of situations that social phobics fear and avoid and, to our knowledge, a self-report questionnaire assessing safety behaviours has not yet been published. The development of the two scales presented in this paper (SIPAAS and SPSBS) were originally included in an integrated protocol, aiming to study the most frequently feared Reprint requests to Jose ´ Pinto-Gouveia, Faculdade de Psicologia e Cie ˆncias da Educac ¸a ˜o da Universidade de Coimbra, Rua do Cole ´gio Novo, Apartado 6153, 3001-802 Coimbra, Portugal. E-mail: jpgouveia@interacesso.pt  2003 British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies