On each index, students were classified into low, medium and high based on the mean across the constituent items.
Thus, the number of constituent items in the study of Matsuda and Gobel was larger than that of Cheng et al. (1999).
Moreover, the factor was analogous to Liu and Jackson's (2008) second factor of test anxiety with three constituent items (10, 25, and 30).
Both our study and Matsuda and Gobel's study (2004) using Japanese samples showed a two-factor structure (their one factor of 21 items; the other factor of 12 items), but with different constituent items for each factor.
In fact, our communication apprehension factor included seven constituent items; it seemed that six items related to communication apprehension (2, 3, 13, 20, 26, and 27), while one item involved fear of negative evaluation (31).
When interpreting four constituent items of the first factor, the factor included the two constructs of communication apprehension (e.g., No. 3) and fear of negative evaluation (e.g., No. 19).
A detailed comparison of constituent items from previous studies was presented above and indicated that several factors of the earlier studies contained a mixture of the three constructs conceptualized by Horwitz et al. (1986).
The first and second factor names were the same as those of the study of Cheng et al. (1999), but the constituent items of those factors were quite different even though both involved participants who were English majors.
When closely examining constituent items of both factors, the feature of the first factor, like that of the second factor of Cheng et al. (1999) study, included all five items of communication involvement between the teacher and the student in classroom situations (4, 15, 19, 29, and 33).
