A Confirmatory Factoring of the Self-Consciousness Scale

Fenigstein, Scheier, and Buss (1975) developed a three subscale inventory designed to measure self-consciousness. Burnkrant and Page (1984) used confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the scale and concluded that five items did not belong to their assigned scales and that one of the original subscales really measured two separable traits. Burnkrant and Page's conclusions may simply reflect incidental properties of the item statistics and could weaken the scale if adopted. Fenigstein et al.'s representation fits the data quite well in its original form. However, items on their social anxiety scale also tend to evoke relatively large variability over subjects and items on their public self-consciousness scale tend to evoke relatively little variability. In other words, items on their subscales differ nearly as much statistically as they do substantively.