SPIN Social Phobia Inventory: Scoring and Interpretation Guide
A clinician's guide to scoring and interpreting the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), Connor and Davidson's 17-item measure of social anxiety. Covers the fear, avoidance and physiological subscales, the published cut-off, the commonly used severity bands, the three-item Mini-SPIN, and use across a course of CBT for social anxiety.
About this resource
The Social Phobia Inventory was developed by Kathryn Connor, Jonathan Davidson and colleagues at Duke University and published in 2000. It was designed to cover the full clinical picture of social anxiety disorder in a short self-report format: fear of social situations and of being judged, avoidance of those situations, and the physical symptoms (blushing, sweating, trembling, palpitations) that people with social anxiety often fear most. The 17 items ask about the past week, so the measure is responsive to change and is widely used as an outcome measure in trials of both psychological and pharmacological treatment.
This resource is a scoring and interpretation guide. The SPIN is copyrighted by Dr. Davidson and is free for clinical use, but we do not reproduce the items; obtain the official version. The guide describes the response format, the total and subscale scoring, the cut-off of 19 that Connor and colleagues (2000) found best separated people with social anxiety disorder from controls, and the severity bands that many clinicians use for feedback, with a clear note about which figures are validated and which are convention. It also introduces the Mini-SPIN, a three-item screen with a published cut-off, for settings where even 17 items are too many.
For clinicians delivering CBT for social anxiety, the SPIN subscales map onto the model: the fear items reflect the negative predictions and self-focused attention that Clark and Wells describe, the avoidance items reflect the safety behaviours and situational avoidance that maintain the problem, and the physiological items reflect the sensations the person believes are visible and shameful. Reading the profile helps you decide where behavioural experiments should start.
How to use it
- Obtain the official SPIN. Give it at assessment and repeat it every few sessions, since it asks about the past week and tracks change well.
- Add all 17 items for the total (0 to 68). The official scoring identifies which items form the fear, avoidance and physiological subscales; add those separately if you want the profile.
- Compare the total to the cut-off of 19. Scores at or above 19 are consistent with social anxiety disorder and support further assessment. Use the severity bands for feedback while being clear that they are a rough guide.
- Use the profile to plan. High avoidance points to graded behavioural experiments and dropping safety behaviours; high physiological scores point to video feedback and experiments testing how visible symptoms really are.
- Track the score across treatment and at follow-up. A move from above to below 19 alongside real changes in behaviour is a meaningful outcome.
References
- Connor, K. M., Davidson, J. R. T., Churchill, L. E., Sherwood, A., Weisler, R. H., & Foa, E. (2000). Psychometric properties of the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN): New self-rating scale. British Journal of Psychiatry, 176, 379-386.
- Connor, K. M., Kobak, K. A., Churchill, L. E., Katzelnick, D., & Davidson, J. R. T. (2001). Mini-SPIN: A brief screening assessment for generalized social anxiety disorder. Depression and Anxiety, 14(2), 137-140.
- Clark, D. M., & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In R. G. Heimberg, M. R. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: Diagnosis, assessment, and treatment (pp. 69-93). Guilford Press.
