Reliability Generalization of Social Appearance Anxiety Scale: A Meta Analysis Study

The Social Appearance Anxiety Scale (SAAS) is one of the self-report scales that measure the anxiety that occurs when people form a negative body image about their body and appearance. This study provides a reliability generalization about the internal consistency estimates of the Social Appearance Anxiety Scale, which consists of 16 items and a single factor developed by Hart et al. (2008). As a result of the search in the identified databases, 96 studies were found. In 4 of these studies, the scale was not used, 23 did not report the reliability coefficient and 1 study could not be accessed. Reliability generalization study was conducted with 68 studies including the reliability coefficient of the relevant scale. It was concluded that the average reliability coefficient was .937 [.930 - .943]. As a result of moderator analyses, it was concluded that there was a statistically significant difference in Cronbach's alpha coefficient according to the subcategories of "language of the scale" and "country of the participants" variables, but there was no statistically significant difference according to the subcategories of "language of the article", "sample type" and "field of study" variables and "average age" variable. With this study, it was concluded that it would not be appropriate to generalize, that is, to use reliability induction, since the reliability coefficients of the Social Appearance Anxiety Scale obtained in different languages and different countries differ. It is recommended that the authors calculate reliability estimates for the data sets they have and report the reliability coefficients obtained.