Brazilian Adaptation of the Social Anxiety Test for University Students (TASU) Brazilian Adaptation of the Social Anxiety Test for University Students (TASU)

Abstract

Social anxiety can be defined as a fear of negative evaluation or failure in social interactions. This phenomenon has a significant prevalence in university students and affects not only academic performance and its continuity but also the psychosocial well-being of this group. Although in Brazil there are several instruments for assessing social anxiety, none of them takes into account the university's situational-cultural context. Therefore, this work aimed to adapt to the Brazilian population the Social Anxiety Test for University Students (TASU), developed in Argentina. The items were translated using the back-translation method and then submitted to expert evaluation for content validity analysis. The scale was applied online to 279 Brazilian college students and we obtained an internal structure of four factors and 26 items, with good rates of internal consistency. In a new data collection with 352 students, we observed that the structure maintained satisfactory adjustment quality indexes and a measurement invariance according to sex and country (Brazil-Argentina). Women had a higher degree of social anxiety than men and Brazilians had higher values ​​of social anxiety than the Argentines. Also, the test presented evidence of validity based on the relationship with external variables, with significant positive correlations with depression and negative correlations with social skills. The normative scores of the factors are presented. We concluded that the Brazilian version of TASU provides measures with evidence of validity and reliability for the assessment of social anxiety in Brazilian college students.