Psychometric properties of the Italian Beliefs About Losing Control Inventory (BALCI-IT) and its associations with related constructs

The present study aimed to validate the Beliefs About Losing Control Inventory (BALCI) in an Italian convenience sample and investigated the role of this construct among relevant symptomatologies. The Beliefs About Losing Control Inventory (BALCI) was translated from English to Italian using established guidelines to guarantee both linguistic and cultural equivalence. The sample consisted of 416 participants, aged between 18 and 65 years old, mainly women (87.02%). The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) supported the original three factor structure that demonstrated a good fit to the data (χ2 = 593.08, df = 186, CFI = .982, TLI = .979, RMSEA = .072). The CFA findings confirmed the anticipated components and variable loadings in the Italian population, demonstrating that BALCI-IT effectively captures aspects of the obsessive-compulsive thought-behavior-emotion axis. Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s Omega indicated great internal consistency (.95) and test-retest correlation (.91). The Italian version of the inventory showed good convergent validity and good correlations with relevant symptomatologies like obsessive-compulsive, panic and social anxiety (-0.66 < r < 0.74; p-value < .001). Whereas correlations with eating disorders symptomatologies were not significant. Overall, the results indicate that BALCI-IT can be used as a measure of beliefs about losing control for Italian adults.