Paura di volare: struttura fattoriale di due questionari
Maria Teresa Triscari, Palmira Faraci, Valerio D’Angelo, Viviana Urso
The paper describes the factorial structures of two self-report scales for the assessment of fear of flying
in the Italian context: the Flight Anxiety Modality Questionnaire (FAM; Van Gerwen, Spinhoven, Van Dyck
and Diekstra, 1999), focused on the symptomatic and cognitive expressions of anxiety related to flight,
and the Flight Anxiety Situations Questionnaire (FAS; Van Gerwen, Spinhoven, Van Dyck and Diekstra,
1999), addressed to measure anxiety produced by specific air-travel phases. The present study was
conducted on a group of 259 participants, including people who experienced fear of flying added to a
non-clinical group of subjects. Exploratory factorial analyses revealed a 3-factor solution for the FAS and
a 2-factor solution for the FAM, showing a substantial invariance between the original structural models
and the investigated Italian version for both instruments. These results provided a first contribution to
construct validity. Besides, the internal consistency for each questionnaires’ subscale was satisfactory.
Future studies are needed to further verify the psychometric properties of both scales and make them
applicable in clinical practise for assessing specific treatment programs’ efficacy.
Keywords
Fear of flying, questionnaires, factor analysis.
