Beck Anxiety Inventory - Clinical Use

Clinical Use

The BAI was specifically designed as "an inventory for measuring clinical anxiety" that minimizes the overlap between depression and anxiety scales. While several studies have shown that anxiety measures, including the Strait-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), are either highly correlated or indistinguishable from depression, the BAI is shown to be less contaminated by depressive content

Since the BAI does only questions symptoms occurring over the last month, it is not a measure of trait anxiety or state anxiety. The BAI can be described as a measure of "prolonged state anxiety," which, in a clinical setting, is an important assessment. A recently created version of the BAI, the Beck Anxiety Inventory-Trait (BAIT), was developed to assess trait anxiety rather than immediate or prolonged state anxiety, much like the STAI. However, unlike the STAI, the BAIT was developed to minimize the overlap between anxiety and depression.

A 1999 review found that the BAI was the third most used research measure of anxiety, behind the STAI and the Fear Survey Schedule, which provides quantitative information about how clients react to possible sources of maladaptive emotional reactions.

The BAI has been used in a variety of different patient groups, including adolescents. Though support exists for using the BAI with high-school students and psychiatric inpatient samples of ages 14 to 18 years, the recently developed diagnostic tool, Beck Youth Inventories, Second Edition, contains a anxiety inventory of 20 questions specifically designed for children and adolescents ages 7 to 18 years old.