Resumo

CUNHA, Marina; PINTO-GOUVEIA, José  e  MORGADO, Catarina. The Portuguese version of the Retrospective Self-Report of Inhibition: a psychometric analysis of RSRI in an Adolescent Community Sample. Psicologia [online]. 2010, vol.24, n.1, pp.97-116. ISSN 0874-2049.

Behavioural inhibition is defined as a consistent restraint in response to unfamiliar social or nonsocial stimuli. Due to the unequivocal importance of behavioural inhibition assessment during childhood and to a better understanding of its role in the development of psychopathology, Reznick and colleagues developed the Retrospective Self-Report of Inhibition (RSRI) scale composed by 30 items that aimed to retrospectively assess behavioural inhibition during childhood (between the 1^st and 6^th school years).The aim of this manuscript is to confirm the RSRI psychometric properties in a Portuguese population and to investigate this instrument utility as a measure of behavioural inhibition during childhood. The first study, conducted with an adolescent sample (n=296) with ages ranging between 12 and 18 years old, revealed that the RSRI shows a good internal consistency and a factorial structure similar to the original version. Evidence for the existence of two factors was maintained: fear/illness related to fears in general and somatic complaints; and a social/school factor that includes items related to fears in the school context and in several social situations. In the second study, conducted with a clinical and a control group (adolescents with a social anxiety disorder diagnosis (n=76), other anxiety disorders (n=28) and without psychopathology (n=76) the scale and its dimensions were analysed regarding their discriminative power. Results show the bidirectional utility of the construct of behavioural inhibition, as assessed by the RSRI, showing that the social fears dimension presents a higher discriminative power when compared with the non-social fears dimension. Suggestions for future research include studies that reinforce these data and contribute to support the utility of this instrument for clinical research with Portuguese adolescents.

Palavras-chave : RSRI scale; adolescence; self-report instruments; behavioural inhibition; social anxiety.

        · resumo em Português     · texto em Português     · Português ( pdf )