A comparison of three self-report measures of intolerance of uncertainty: an examination of structure and incremental explanatory power in a community sample.

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) has been broadly defined as a dispositional fear of the unknown and appears to span across emotional disorders. Despite the fact that IU has received increased attention from clinical researchers, little systematic research has been completed to compare existing self-report measures of this construct. To help fill this gap in the extant literature, the structure and incremental explanatory power of 3 self-report measures of IU were examined in the present research using a large community sample of adults in the United States (N = 624). Results from confirmatory factor analyses supported the distinctiveness of the items of the 3 measures. Nonetheless, a higher order factor accounted for the latent correlations among the 3 measures, indicating that each measure assesses the same construct. Results from structural regression models indicated that each measure of IU tended to evidence incremental explanatory power beyond one another in the concurrent prediction of variance in scores of symptom measures. These results support the notion that all 3 of the targeted measures assess IU, although each measure appears to assess a distinct aspect of this construct. (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.