LSAS: 24 social situations, each rated twice
Most anxiety questionnaires ask how you feel. The Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale asks two questions about every situation: how much fear it produces, and how often you avoid it. Liebowitz published it in 1987 while working on social phobia at Columbia, and it stayed in clinical use because the second question often matters more than the first. Feeling nervous before a meeting and skipping the meeting are different problems.
Twenty-four situations, each rated twice on a 0 to 3 scale, which makes 48 ratings. Fear sums to a range of 0 to 72, avoidance sums to the same, and the total runs 0 to 144. Nothing is reverse scored, so the arithmetic is addition.
| Subscale | Items | Range | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | 13 | 0 to 78 | Situations where someone is watching or evaluating you |
| Social interaction | 11 | 0 to 66 | Conversations, meetings, parties, disagreement |
| Fear | 24 | 0 to 72 | How much anxiety each situation produces |
| Avoidance | 24 | 0 to 72 | How often you stay away from it |
Where the cutoffs came from
Clinicians needed a line, so the scale has several. Scores below 30 make social anxiety disorder unlikely. The 30 to 59 band suggests a possible diagnosis, 60 to 90 makes it very likely, and above 90 usually means the person is in real distress and struggling socially. Those bands are clinical conventions rather than population norms, so a score in the 40s means something different for someone who has never sought help.
The Chinese validation drew its own line at 38, where sensitivity was 85.5% and specificity 81.3% across 754 people (He and Zhang, 2004). This page reads your total against six descriptive bands instead:
| Total | Reading |
|---|---|
| 0-29 | No significant social anxiety |
| 30-49 | Mild |
| 50-64 | Moderate |
| 65-79 | Marked |
| 80-94 | Severe |
| 95-144 | Very severe |
Reliability
Internal consistency for the total runs 0.94 to 0.96 across samples. The fear scale alone reached 0.94 and the social interaction scale 0.92 in diagnostic samples. Over a 15-day gap in 269 people, the retest correlation was 0.82 and the intraclass correlation 0.81. A sample of 97 African American adults with anxiety disorders held up over a full year.
The factor structure is not settled
Liebowitz proposed two factors, fear and avoidance, and they correlate so highly that the second adds little information. Safren and colleagues (1999) dropped five items and found four factors: social interaction, public speaking, being observed, and eating in public. Baker and colleagues (2002) found five. A Brazilian Portuguese validation did not reproduce either cleanly. The practical consequence is simple: read the total and the two subscale scores, and treat any finer breakdown as a research question rather than a result.
What it correlates with
| Measure | r |
|---|---|
| Social Phobia Scale | 0.44 to 0.80 |
| Social Interaction Anxiety Scale | 0.33 to 0.80 |
| Brief Social Phobia Scale | 0.44 to 0.84 |
| Beck Anxiety Inventory | 0.23 to 0.46 |
| Beck Depression Inventory | 0.25 to 0.48 |
The pattern is what you would want. Correlations with other social anxiety measures run high, correlations with general anxiety and depression sit lower, and the LSAS moves when treatment works. It has been used as an endpoint in drug trials for social anxiety, which is a harder test than internal consistency.
What this page is not
The LSAS is a screening and severity measure, not a diagnosis. A high score says social situations cost you a lot, and it cannot tell you whether that is social anxiety disorder, shyness, or a bad year at work. Structured interviews do that job. If the score is high and avoidance is shaping where you go and what you apply for, that is worth raising with a professional. This page is not a diagnosis and does not replace one.