The Penn State Worry Questionnaire

The PSWQ is a self-report measure assessing clinically significant worry (Meyer et al., 1990). It consists of 16 items rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 = not at all typical of me to 5 = very typical of me (sample item: “I am always worrying about something”), depending on whether the item is worded positively or negatively. The cutoff point of 53 was used in this based on the literature on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (Park et al., 2014). Adequate test–retest reliability of 0.74 was reported (VivWuthrich et al., 2014). The PSWQ was translated independently by three psychology professors following International Test Commission Guidelines for Translating and Adapting Tests (ITC, 2017), using a forward–backward translation method. The three professors are native Arabic speakers who completed their graduate studies in the Western universities. The Arabic version was given to a specialist in translation studies who translated it back into English to ensure semantic equivalence. In the current study, the Cronbach's α reliability was 0.85 (M = 48.26; SD = 8.13).