[3][4] The questions used in this measure ask about common symptoms of anxiety that the subject has had during the past week (including the day you take it) (such as numbness and tingling, sweating not due to heat, and fear of the worst happening).

The standardized cutoffs are: The BAI has been criticized for its predominant focus on physical symptoms of anxiety (most akin to a panic response).

[9] In 1993, Beck, Steer, and Beck used a three factor structure including subjective, somatic, and panic subscale scores to differentiate among a sample of clinically anxious outpatients[10] Because the somatic subscale is emphasized on the BAI, with 15 out of 21 items measuring physiological symptoms, perhaps the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of anxiety are being deemphasized.

The BAI can be described as a measure of "prolonged state anxiety", which, in a clinical setting, is an important assessment.

[24] A 1999 review found that the BAI was the third most used research measure of anxiety, behind the STAI and the Fear Survey Schedule,[25] which provides quantitative information about how clients react to possible sources of maladaptive emotional reactions.

Though support exists for using the BAI with high-school students and psychiatric inpatient samples of ages 14 to 18 years,[26] the recently developed diagnostic tool, Beck Youth Inventories, Second Edition, contains an anxiety inventory of 20 questions specifically designed for children and adolescents ages 7 to 18 years old.

This suggests that perhaps the BAI cannot adequately differentiate between depression and anxiety in a primary care population.