Psychometric Data on the Statistics Anxiety Scale for a Sample of South African Students

Abstract

Normative, reliability, and validity data are reported on the Statistics Anxiety Scale (SAS) (an adapted version of the Mathematics Anxiety Scale) for a sample of South African students. The respondents consisted of 337 third-year Psychology students engaged in statistics as part of the Research Methodology course at the University of Western Cape. The internal-consistency reliability estimate obtained was 0.90, while test-retest reliability was 0.75 over a 3-month interval, indicating that the SAS was highly reliable. Evidence for the validity of the scale is based on the results of a factor analysis which confirmed the existence of a single factor, the finding that SAS scores are related to achievement in statistics and anxiety, and that the SAS appears to be sensitive to changes in statistics anxiety resulting from intervention.