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Article: Comparison of Unitary and Multidimensional Models of the Whiteley Index in a Nonclinical Sample: Implications for Understanding and Assessing Health Anxiety
- Article from:
- Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy
- Article date:
- July 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Springer Publishing Company 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Health anxiety is an important but poorly assessed phenomenon. Manifesting along a continuum, health anxiety is the result of a catastrophic appraisal of somatic sensations and changes as indicative of disease. The Whiteley Index (WI) is one of the most widely used self-report measures for assessing health anxiety both for research and for clinical practice. It generally exhibits excellent and robust psychometric properties for internal consistency, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and concurrent validity; however, both its item content and its factor structure are matters of debate. Moreover, the measure has rarely been assessed in nonclinical samples. For the present study, a ...