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 concerning the frequency of anxiety symptoms and their intensity, as well as interference with the person’s work or school and social life. Items ask about experiences in the past week.

Note: During administration, it is appropriate to provide respondents with a definition of anxiety.

Length of filling

OASIS takes approximately 3-4 minutes to complete.

Individualized feedback for the respondent

By filling in the scale, the respondent will find out the severity of their anxiety symptoms, or their improvement or worsening after repeated filling.

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 summed to yield a total score ranging from 0 to 20. Higher scores indicate greater severity and functional impairment due to anxiety symptoms.

Response scale

The answers to the items in this Czech adaptation correspond to the original version. For each item, there are always four possible answers scored according to severity on a scale from 0 to 4. An example answer could be: “Never. I have not had any anxiety in the past week.” (0) or “Constant anxiety. I felt anxious all the time and could never relax.” (4).

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/