Background
Fear of abandonment is one of those things almost everyone recognizes but few people can describe precisely. It might look like needing your partner to text back immediately, or feeling a quiet dread every time someone you love travels for work, or never quite letting yourself believe a relationship will last. The Deenz Abandonment Anxiety Scale (DAAS) was built to put some shape around that experience — to take a feeling most people only describe in vague terms and turn it into something you can actually look at and measure.
DAAS-20 asks respondents to answer twenty short statements about how they think and act in close relationships, rating each one from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). It takes most people well under ten minutes. What comes out the other end is a total score between 20 and 100, where higher numbers point toward stronger abandonment-related anxiety — but the total score is really just the headline. The more useful part of the DAAS-20 is what happens underneath it.
That's because "abandonment anxiety" isn't really a single thing. Two people can both score high on this scale and look completely different in how their anxiety plays out. One might be constantly fishing for reassurance, asking their partner over and over if things are okay. Another might seem calm most of the time but fall apart during any real separation. A third might have given up on trust altogether, quietly assuming every relationship has an expiration date. A fourth might handle the fear by pulling away first, keeping people at arm's length so it doesn't hurt as much later. The DAAS-20 tries to capture all four of these patterns separately — Reassurance Seeking, Separation Anxiety, Trust Difficulty, and Emotional Detachment — rather than flattening them into one generic anxiety number.
Scoring & Interpretation
The scale consists of 20 items evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree through 5 = Strongly Agree). One item—number 16—is reverse-scored to control for response bias.
The items are distributed across four equal subscales:
Reassurance Seeking: items 1, 5, 9, 13, 17 (raw score range 5–25)
Separation Anxiety: items 2, 6, 10, 14, 18 (raw score range 5–25)
Trust Difficulty: items 3, 7, 11, 15, 19 (raw score range 5–25)
Emotional Detachment: items 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 (raw score range 5–25)
The overall score is calculated by summing all 20 processed items, resulting in a total raw score range of 20 to 100. Individual subscale scores are converted into a standardized 0–100 scale to facilitate profiling and comparison.
Deenz Abandonment Anxiety Scale Questionnaire
Below is the Deenz Abandonment Anxiety Scale, a digitally adapted 20- items self-assessment questionnaire. You'll be given 20 short statements describing everyday relational thoughts and feelings. For each statement, rate how closely it reflects your experiences using a 5-point scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree). The assessment can be self-administered or completed in group settings. There is no time limit, and completion typically takes between 5 and 8 minutes.