An account of the anxiety scale amongst children

Abstract

The article presents the first results of the application of the AFS anxiety scale devised by Wieczerkowski and associates (1973) which was constructed on the model of scales for examining anxiety amongst children such as MAS, CMAS and TASC. The AFS scale examines the anxiety of children between the ages of 9 and 16 regarding three basic aspects of experience (3 subscales): anxiety in the examining situation, general anxiety and dissatisfaction with school. The subscale of social desirability or the lie-scale is a constitutive part of AFS. Seeking to verify the validity of this instrument on the Croatian population the authors used a Croatian translation of the questionnaire on a sample of 701 fifth grade elementary school pupils. The results of the investigation show that all four scales of the AFS questionnaire, although in a bit shortened version, have satisfactory metric characteristics in relation to the Croatian population.