Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS)

The Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS) is a valid and reliable instrument developed to assess the severity and worsening of anxiety disorders and/or symptoms. The advantage of the scale is its brevity and ease of use: it contains 5 items relating to the frequency of anxiety symptoms and their intensity, as well as interference with the person’s work or school and social life. The items ask about experiences in the last week.

Note: When administering, it is useful to provide respondents with a definition of anxiety.

Length of completion

The OASIS takes approximately 3-4 minutes to complete.

Individualized feedback for the respondent

By completing the scale, the respondent will determine the severity of his/her anxiety symptoms, and whether they have improved or worsened after repeated completion.

Keywords

Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale, OASIS, anxiety, anxiety disorder, anxiety symptoms

Scoring and interpretation

Responses to items are coded from 0 to 4 and can be summed to obtain a total score ranging from 0 to 20. Higher scores indicate greater severity and functional impairment due to anxiety symptoms.

Response Scale

The responses to the items in this Czech adaptation are abbreviated from the original version to more closely resemble a typical Likert scale: 0=Never, 1=Rarely, 2=Sometimes, 3=Frequently, and 4=Always.

References

Norman, S.B., Campbell-Sills, L., Hitchcock, C.A., Sullivan, S., Rochlin, A.A., Wilkins, K.C., & Stein, M.B. (2011). Psychometrics of a brief measure of anxiety to detect severity and impairment: the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS). Journal of psychiatric research, 45(2), 262-268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2008.03.014

Norman, S.B., Hami Cissell, S., Means-Christensen, A.J. and Stein, M.B. (2006). Development and validation of an Overall Anxiety Severity And Impairment Scale (OASIS). Depression and Anxiety, 23(4), 245-249. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.20182

Mikoska, P., Novak, L., Pilarik, L., & Bok, T. (2022). A Czech version of the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS): standardization and psychometric properties. BMC Psychiatry, 22(822). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-022-04365-5

Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS). (2023). Greenspace. Retrieved March 18, 2023, from https://greenspacehealth.com/en-ca/anxiety-oasis/

Sandora, J., Novak, L., Brnka, R., van Dijk, J. P., Tavel, P., & Malinakova, K. (2021). The Abbreviated Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS) and the Abbreviated Overall Depression Severity and Impairment Scale (ODSIS): Psychometric Properties and Evaluation of the Czech Versions. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(19), 10337. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph181910337