The Bergen Shopping Addiction Scale (BSAS) is a brief
screening tool for assessing the severity of
shopping addiction
Shopping addiction is characterized by an eagerness to purchase unnecessary or superfluous things and a lack of impulse control when it comes to shopping. It is a concept similar to compulsive buying disorder (''oniomania''), but usually has a mor ...
.
Background
The Bergen Scale is named after the city of
Bergen
Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285,900. Bergen is the second-largest city in Norway. The municipality covers and is on the peninsula o ...
, Norway, the location of the
University of Bergen
The University of Bergen ( no, Universitetet i Bergen, ) is a research-intensive state university located in Bergen, Norway. As of 2019, the university has over 4,000 employees and 18,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 194 ...
, where lead author
Cecilie Andreassen is a professor of
clinical psychology
Clinical psychology is an integration of social science, theory, and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically based distress or Mental disorder, dysfunction and to promote subjective mental ...
.
Format
The Bergen Shopping Addiction Scale (BSAS) consists of 28 statements. The participant is asked to rate how strongly each of the statements relates to their thoughts and behavior in the last 12 months. Each item is rated on a five-point continuum of agreement: completely disagree, disagree, neither disagree nor agree, agree, completely agree. Groups of four items are targeted toward each of seven addiction criteria (salience, mood modification, conflict, tolerance, withdrawal, relapse, and problems).
Improvements
The BSAS offers several improvements over prior compulsive shopping assessments.
*
Compulsive shopping has been increasingly placed within the
behavioral addiction
Behavioral addiction is a form of addiction that involves a compulsion to engage in a rewarding non- substance-related behavior – sometimes called a natural reward – despite any negative consequences to the person's physical, mental, social ...
paradigm, while existing assessments have primarily been rooted within the
impulse-control or
obsessive–compulsive disorder
Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental and behavioral disorder in which an individual has intrusive thoughts and/or feels the need to perform certain routines repeatedly to the extent where it induces distress or impairs general ...
paradigms.
* While existing screens tend not assess the core criteria and components of addiction, the BSAS directly addresses each of the seven addiction criteria with sets of four items.
* Unlike existing screens, which tend to use the terms "shopping," "buying," and "spending" interchangeably, the BSAS items were created with the nuance between these terms in mind and is generally more reflective of contemporary shopping habits.
See also
*
Diagnostic classification and rating scales used in psychiatry
Diagnosis is the identification of the nature and cause of a certain phenomenon. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines, with variations in the use of logic, analytics, and experience, to determine " cause and effect". In systems enginee ...
References
External links
Online version of the BSAS
Behavioral addiction
Mental disorders screening and assessment tools
{{psych-stub