BAI works well

Not sure I'd pick it over the Beck or Spielberger, but the revised Manifest Anxiety Scale is another safe bet. If you want something really, really quick & dirty, there's a 3-item Brief Assessment of Anxiety (von der Embse et al., 2015, in School Psychology Quarterly). If you want something longer, you could try the Brief Symptom Inventory (short form of the SCL-90). Not supposed to be just about anxiety, but it really mainly measures anxious depression. Or just use the anxiety subscale items from the SCL-90.

A rating scale based on a structured interview such as the Hamilton would be nice instead of (or in addition to) a self-report. After all, the self-reports are all going to be pretty similar. Agree or disagree: I feel tense, I am nervous, My nerves get the better of me, on and on and on.

I agree that it would be easier to help if we knew what aspect of anxiety you're looking to measure, how carefully vs. quickly/efficiently, and so forth.

If you are interested in trait anxiety, try the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP): http://ipip.ori.org/

thanks for the prompt. I'm interested in a trait based measure for adults in the community (not limited to clinical samples). As a comparison we have collected data from 1000s in a multi method study to calibrate each score on the beck depression inventory. We want to do the same for anxiety such that we can state what a person with a score of XX on the XX scale shows in terms of their behavioral, interpersonal, and daily functioning profile.

I couldn't find sufficient psychometric so to be impressed with the adult manifest anxiety or ipip anxiety. I'd like to use a measure that has strong construct validity, including sensitivity to treatment.

Thanks

Todd

Another: 

Article Measuring anxiety by ordered categorical items in data with ...

Offhand, I'd have said the BAI, STAI, and AMAS all enjoyed pretty decent psychometric properties. But I guess you're reading the literature closely. Maybe a Neuroticism scale, from the NEO-PI, EPQ-R, or another well-established personality measure? Just one last thought: if you're measuring trait anxiety, then it should not be very sensitive to treatment, at least not brief treatments. It's supposed to take a bit of time and effort to change personality traits.

The literature is replete with instances of personality change following psychotherapy. Example:

Fisher, P. L., & Durham, R. C. (1999). Recovery rates in generalized anxiety disorder following psychological therapy: an analysis of clinically significant change in the STAI-T across outcome studies since 1990. Psychological medicine, 29(06), 1425-1434.

Thanks for your help everyone.

I quite agree, Todd. I only said "a bit of time and effort," and that if looking for change is a major goal, and the treatment will be a brief one, then a "state" measure would be more sensitive.

Hi Todd. Although I may be biased, the STICA is quite good (first citation below). I also like the DASS, but that may be more out of convenience of assessing 3 symptom sets in clinical settings.

Gros, D. F., Antony, M. M., Simms, L. J., & McCabe, R. E. (2007). Psychometric properties of the State-Trait Inventory for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety (STICSA): Comparison to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Psychological Assessment, 19, 369-381.

I like the IDAS (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17845118) because it can differentiate anxiety from depression and has subscales that map on to diagnoses quite well.

Gros, interesting, do you guys have other data on the STICSA in the pipeline? if so, email it to me. I definitely appreciate the extra attention to distinguishing anxiety from depression. Marcel, for the same reason, good call. I forgot about this one. Although its a pretty lengthy measure and is it proprietary? 

Sure. I'm using it with all of my treatment studies. I'll email you a bunch of the psychometric publications on it. That reference above has been cited over 200x so it's becoming a popular measure :).

Hi Todd, I have used the GAD-7 for my study (see http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=410326 and http://www.phqscreeners.com/ for the scale). It is very brief and covered all the important symptoms of anxiety. The brevity (only 7 items) is indispensable in large surveys or in longitudinal studies. The scale has also been translated and validated in many languages. Of course, there are still many validation works that can be done (e.g. sensitivity and specificity for various anxiety diagnoses).