Development and validation of the statistical anxiety scale

Nowadays, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that personality variables can play an important role in the prediction of academic performance. However, many authors have mentioned that the differences in the prediction power of broad and narrow personality measures must be taken into account. We develop and validate a scale to assess the anxiety encountered when taking a statistics course. We designed the inventory as a set of 24 positive sentences that measure three subscales: Examination Anxiety , Asking for Help Anxiety and Interpretation Anxiety . In addition, as the three dimensions correlated with each other, they were considered related subscales from an overall scale, which measures statistical anxiety. Results show that these specific measures of anxiety about statistics have a significant relationship with academic performance in statistics whereas broader measures of anxiety or neuroticism do not.