Tag: Generalized anxiety

Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS)

Description
The Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS; Chorpita, Yim, Moffitt, Umemoto & Francis, 2000) is a 47-item self report measure which assesses the frequency of anxiety and depression symptoms in youth aged 8-18 years.  The RCADS was developed in Hawaii, United States and is partly a revision of Spence’s Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; 1997).  The measure has a parent-version form as well as a short-form (RCADS-25; Ebesutani et al., 2012). The RCADS is composed of 6 scales, 5 of which are related to anxiety (separation anxiety disorder, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder) and another one related to major depressive disorder. The scales are aligned with anxiety and depression diagnosis criteria in the DSM-IV. Individuals rate their answers on a 4-point likert scale ranging from “never” to “always”.  The results can be scored manually or via the scoring software created by the authors. In terms of results, T-scores greater than 65 are borderline clinically significant whereas those above 75 are clinically significant. These T-scores indicate that the individual’s responses reflect anxiety and depression-related symptoms very similar to those of individuals who meet diagnostic criteria for that particular disorder or syndrome.

Psychometrics
The RCADS has good internal consistency with Cronbach alpha values ranging from .78 for social anxiety disorder to .88 for panic disorder in a clinical population (Chorpita, Moffitt & Gray, 2005) as well as acceptable internal consistency in the general population (Chorpita et al.,2000).  Furthermore, the measure has good convergent validity with similar measures such as the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS; Reynolds & Richmond, 1978), the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) and interview dimensional ratings (Chorpita et al., 2005).  The RCADS also has favourable test-retest reliability for most scales with the social phobia scale being most reliable (0.80) and the obsessive compulsive disorder scale generally being the least reliable (0.65) when tested in a community sample of school children and adolescents (Chorpita et al., 2000). In terms of model fit, a study by Chorpita et al. (2005) using confirmatory factor analysis indicated an adequate model fit for a 6-factor model when compared to a 1 factor and a 2 factor model. The RCADS has been successfully validated in several countries including Australia (de Ross, Gullone & Chorpita,2002), Denmark (Esbjorn, Somhovd, Turnstedt & Reinholdt-Dunne, 2010), the Netherlands (Kosters, Chinapaw, Zwaanswijk, van der Wal & Koot, 2015) and Spain (Sandin, Valiente & Chorot, 2009) in clinical and school-based samples.

Use
The RCADS is available publicly and free of cost from www.childfirst.ucla.edu/resources.html. It can be used for both educational and professional purposes. However, if you want to use this tool for research purposes, permission is required from the authors. It’s a valuable tool for use with youth suspected of having an anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder as its scales reflect DSM-IV criteria and it’s one of the only anxiety measures that also measures depressive symptoms separately.  Furthermore, the RCADS has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Chinese and French and due to its cross-cultural validations, it can be used with youth from different cultures. It should be noted that the RCADS is only standardized for grades 3 and above as T-Score conversions have not been developed for children younger than grade three. Therefore, the authors recommend using clinical judgement for interpreting raw scores for these children.

 

References

Chorpita, B. F., Moffitt, C. E., & Gray, J. (2005). Psychometric properties of the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale in a clinical sample. Behaviour research and therapy, 43(3), 309-322.

Chorpita, B. F., Yim, L., Moffitt, C., Umemoto, L. A., & Francis, S. E. (2000). Assessment of symptoms of DSM-IV anxiety and depression in children: A revised child anxiety and depression scale. Behaviour research and therapy, 38(8), 835-855.

de Ross, R. L., Gullone, E., & Chorpita, B. F. (2002). The revised child anxiety and depression scale: a psychometric investigation with Australian youth. Behaviour Change, 19(02), 90-101.

Ebesutani, C., Reise, S. P., Chorpita, B. F., Ale, C., Regan, J., Young, J., … & Weisz, J. R. (2012). The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale-Short Version: Scale reduction via exploratory bifactor modeling of the broad anxiety factor. Psychological Assessment, 24(4), 833.

Esbjørn, B. H., Sømhovd, M. J., Turnstedt, C., & Reinholdt-Dunne, M. L. (2012). Assessing the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) in a national sample of Danish youth aged 8–16 years. PLoS One, 7(5), e37339.

Kösters, M. P., Chinapaw, M. J., Zwaanswijk, M., van der Wal, M. F., & Koot, H. M. (2015). Structure, reliability, and validity of the revised child anxiety and depression scale (RCADS) in a multi-ethnic urban sample of Dutch children. BMC psychiatry, 15(1), 132.

Reynolds, C. R., & Richmond, B. O. (1978). What I think and feel: A revised measure of children’s manifest anxiety. Journal of abnormal child psychology, 6(2), 271-280.

Sandín, B., Valiente, R. M., & Chorot, P. (2009). RCADS: evaluación de los síntomas de los trastornos de ansiedad y depresión en niñosy adolescentes. Revista de Psicopatología y Psicología Clínica, 14(3), 193-206.

Spence, S. H. (1998). A measure of anxiety symptoms among children. Behaviour research and therapy, 36(5), 545-566.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder Screener-7 (GAD-7)

The Generalized Anxiety Disorder Screener (GAD-7; Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams, & Lowe, 2006) is a brief, 7-item self-report measure for anxiety symptoms in adolescents (Daig, Herschbach, Lehmann, Knoll, & Decker, 2009; Farrand & Woodford, 2013; Johnson, Harris, Spitzer, & Williams, 2002) and adults (Spitzer et al., 2006). Although developed primarily as a screening tool for GAD, it can also be used as: a) a diagnostic tool (Spitzer et al., 2006), b) to monitor changes in symptoms over time (Kertz, Bigda-Peyton, & Bjorgvinsson, 2013), and as a screener for social anxiety, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Kroenke, Spitzer, Williams, Monahan, & Lowe, 2007).

The development of the GAD-7 began with the development the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD) at Columbia University, USA. The PRIME-MD was an instrument developed and validated in the early 1990s to diagnose five of the most common mental disorders presenting in clinical populations, including anxiety (Spitzer et al., 1994). It comprised a 2-stage process including self-report and clinically administered items for screen positive individuals. However, the length of time this process took (up to 12 minutes in clinical populations) proved a barrier to universal screening in primary practice, and was thus modified, developed, and validated into the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ; Spitzer, Kroenke, & Williams, 1999; Spitzer, Williams, Kroenke, Hornyak, & McMurray, 2000). The GAD-7 is one of the key questionnaires in the PHQ, and has been validated in 2740 primary care patients (Spitzer et al., 2006). Example items include “Feeling nervous, anxious or on edge”, “Not being able to stop or control worrying”, and “Worrying too much about different things”. Each item is rated on a likert-type scale from zero (“not at all”) to three (“nearly every day”), with total scores ranging from 0 to 21 (< 5 mild anxiety; 10-15 moderate anxiety; 15+ severe anxiety). Individuals with scores of 10+ are recommend for further assessment (Spitzer et al, 2006).

The GAD-7 demonstrates good convergent validity with the Beck Anxiety Inventory (r = 0.72) (BAI; Beck, Epstein, Brown, & Steer, 1988) and the anxiety subscale of the Symptom Checklist-90 (r = 0.74) (SCL-90; Derogatis, Lipman, Rickels, Uhlenhuth, & Covi, 1974). It also has excellent internal consistency (α = .92) and test-retest reliability (r = .83; Spitzer et al., 2006). A recent systematic review and diagnostic meta-analysis of 11 studies by Plummer, Manea, Trepel, and McMillan (2016) revealed the GAD-7 had acceptable properties for identifying GAD at cut off scores between 7-10, with optimal sensitivity/ specificity at a cut-off of 8 [sensitivity: 0.83 (95% CI 0.71–0.91), specificity: 0.84 (95% CI 0.70–0.92)].

The GAD-7 is available in over 20 languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Cultural adaptations of the Spanish (Garcia-Campayo et al., 2010) and Portuguese (Sousa et al., 2015) versions demonstrates good to excellent internal consistency, reliability, and validity (.71+). Criteria validity (using Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis for the Spanish version also showed excellent specificity, sensitivity, positive, and negative predictive values (86%+) (Mills et al., 2014). The GAD-7, including manual, instructions and all translations, are available free online (http://www.phqscreeners.com), with no permissions required to reproduce, translate, display or distribute them.

Based on the available literature reviewed, it is recommended that the GAD-7 is useful both as a clinical instrument and in research; however, there is a caveat to be aware of – the PHQ (of which GAD-7 is part of), was developed with the support of an educational grant from Pfizer Inc, a pharmaceutical company, and it is not clear if the authors receive any royalties from Pfizer. However, it is beneficial to see good convergent validity with other well-known anxiety instruments, report in peer reviewed journals (including from teams not associated with the authors and Pfizer), and declaration of funding from Pfizer.

 

References

Beck, A. T., Epstein, N., Brown, G., & Steer, R. A. (1988). An inventory for measuring clinical anxiety: psychometric properties. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 56(6), 893-897.

Daig, I., Herschbach, P., Lehmann, A., Knoll, N., & Decker, O. (2009). Gender and age differences in domain-specific life satisfaction and the impact of depressive and anxiety symptoms: a general population survey from Germany. Quality of Life Research, 18(6), 669-678. doi:10.1007/s11136-009-9481-3

Derogatis, L. R., Lipman, R. S., Rickels, K., Uhlenhuth, E. H., & Covi, L. (1974). The Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL): A self-report symptom inventory. Behavioral Science, 19(1), 1-15. doi:10.1002/bs.3830190102

Farrand, P., & Woodford, J. (2013). Measurement of individualised quality of life amongst young people with indicated personality disorder during emerging adulthood using the SEIQoL-DW. Quality of Life Research, 22(4), 829-838. doi:10.1007/s11136-012-0210-y

Garcia-Campayo, J., Zamorano, E., Ruiz, M. A., Pardo, A., Perez-Paramo, M., Lopez-Gomez, V., . . . Rejas, J. (2010). Cultural adaptation into Spanish of the generalized anxiety disorder-7 (GAD-7) scale as a screening tool. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 8, 8. doi:10.1186/1477-7525-8-8

Johnson, J. G., Harris, E. S., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. (2002). The patient health questionnaire for adolescents: validation of an instrument for the assessment of mental disorders among adolescent primary care patients. Journal of Adolescent Health, 30(3), 196-204.

Kertz, S., Bigda-Peyton, J., & Bjorgvinsson, T. (2013). Validity of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale in an acute psychiatric sample. Clin Psychol Psychother, 20(5), 456-464. doi:10.1002/cpp.1802

Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., Williams, J. B., Monahan, P. O., & Lowe, B. (2007). Anxiety disorders in primary care: prevalence, impairment, comorbidity, and detection. Annals of Internal Medicine, 146(5), 317-325.

Mills, S. D., Fox, R. S., Malcarne, V. L., Roesch, S. C., Champagne, B. R., & Sadler, G. R. (2014). The Psychometric Properties of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale in Hispanic Americans with English or Spanish Language Preference. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 20(3), 463-468. doi:10.1037/a0036523

Plummer, F., Manea, L., Trepel, D., & McMillan, D. (2016). Screening for anxiety disorders with the GAD-7 and GAD-2: a systematic review and diagnostic metaanalysis. General Hospital Psychiatry, 39, 24-31. doi:10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2015.11.005

Sousa, T. V., Viveiros, V., Chai, M. V., Vicente, F. L., Jesus, G., Carnot, M. J., . . . Ferreira, P. L. (2015). Reliability and validity of the Portuguese version of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scale. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 13(1), 50. doi:10.1186/s12955-015-0244-2

Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., & Williams, J. B. (1999). Validation and utility of a self-report version of PRIME-MD: the PHQ primary care study. Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders. Patient Health Questionnaire. JAMA, 282(18), 1737-1744.

Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B., & Lowe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: the GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092-1097. doi:10.1001/archinte.166.10.1092

Spitzer, R. L., Williams, J. B., Kroenke, K., Hornyak, R., & McMurray, J. (2000). Validity and utility of the PRIME-MD patient health questionnaire in assessment of 3000 obstetric-gynecologic patients: the PRIME-MD Patient Health Questionnaire Obstetrics-Gynecology Study. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 183(3), 759-769.

Spitzer, R. L., Williams, J. B., Kroenke, K., Linzer, M., deGruy, F. V., 3rd, Hahn, S. R., . . .Johnson, J. G. (1994). Utility of a new procedure for diagnosing mental disorders in primary care. The PRIME-MD 1000 study. JAMA, 272(22), 1749-1756.

Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children (PSWQ-C)

Developed in America, the Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children (PSWQ-C) (Chorpita et al., 1997) is one of the most widely used instruments for assessing general characteristics of worry in children and adolescence aged 7 to 17. More specifically the PSWQ-C measures the tendency of youth to engage in excessive, generalized and uncontrollable worry (Muris, Meesters & Gobel, 2001). The PSWQ-C is a modified version of the PSWQ which was developed by Meyer et al., (1990) to assess worry in adults. Like the original instrument, the PSWQ-C is administered using self-report, however the Likert rating scale was reduced from being 5 to 4-point and the wording of nine of the original items was modified to make them more developmentally appropriate and readable for children at the second-grade level and above. For example, the item “I find it easy to dismiss worrisome thoughts” was reworded to “I find it easy to stop worrying when I want” (Chorpirta et al., 1997). Moreover, psychometric analysis of the original PSWQ-C on a community sample of school students lead to the elimination of two or the 16 items, the revised version of the PSWQ-C thus contains only 14 items, with 3 of the items being reversed scored. Examples of items from the PSWQ-C include:

“My worries really bother me”

“I don’t really worry about things.” [negatively scored]

“I know I shouldn’t worry but I just can’t help it.”

Respondents are asked to rate how often each item applies to them by choosing from a 4-point Likert scale consisting of never (0), sometimes (1), often (2) and always (3). The scores from each item are summed together to yield a total score that ranges from 0-42, with higher scores reflecting higher levels of worry (Chorpita et al., 1997).

The PSWQ-C has shown sound psychometric properties in both community samples (Chorpita et al., 1997; Muris, Messters & Gobel, 2001) and clinical samples (Chorpita et al., 1997; Pestle, Chorpita & Schiffman, 2008). PSWQ-C has also been found to have good internal reliability, with Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from .89 (Chorpita et al., 1996) to .91 (Pestle, Chorpita & Schiffman, 2008) for community samples and a Cronbach alpha coefficient of .82 for a large clinical sample (Muris, Messters & Gobel, 2001) (Table 1). In both community and clinical samples, the PSWQ-C has shown high convergent validity with other assessment measurements for worry including the worry/oversensitive measure of the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) (Chorpita et al., 1997), Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) (Chorpita et al., 1997) and the revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) (Pestle, Chorpita & Schiffman, 2008). The PSWQ-C has also demonstrated favourable test-retest reliability; re-test after 1 and 3 weeks test-retest correlation coefficient of r=.92 (Chorpita et al., 1997), r = .83 (Kang, Shin & Song, 2010) respectively. Finally, the PSWQ-C has demonstrated to be valid in cross cultural populations, yielding good psychometric properties in community samples in France (Gosselin, Trembley, Dugas & Ladouceur, 2002) Denmark (Esbjørn, Reinholdt-DunneCaspersen, Christensen, & Chorpita, 2013) and Korea (Kang, Shin & Song, 2010).

The PSWQ-C is available to for research and professional use and can be found online: http://www.childfirst.ucla.edu/Resources.html. The PSWQ-C manual which includes rating scales, scoring instructions and norm tables can be obtained free of charge, by contacting Bruce F. Chorpita.

References

Chorpita, B. F., Tracey, S. A., Brown, T. A., Collica, T. J., & Barlow, D. H. (1997). Assessment of worry in children and adolescents: An adaptation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35(6), 569-581.

Esbjørn, B. H., Reinholdt-Dunne, M. L., Caspersen, I. D., Christensen, L. B., & Chorpita, B. F. (2013). Penn State Worry Questionnaire: Findings form normative and clinical samples in Denmark. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 35(1), 113-122. doi: 10.1037/h0086923

Gosselin, P., Tremblay, M., Dugas, M. J., & Ladouceur, R. (2002). Les inquiétudes chez les adolescents: Propriétés psychométriques de la version français du Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 43(4), 270. doi:10.1037/h0086923

Kang, S. G., Shin, J. H., & Song, S. W. (2010). Reliability and validity of the Korean version of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire in primary school children. Journal of Korean medical science, 25(8), 1210-1216. doi:10.3346/jkms.2010.25.8.1210

Muris, P., Meesters, C., & Gobel, M. (2001). Reliability, validity, and normative data of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire in 8–12-yr-old children. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 32(2), 63-72.

Pestle, S. L., Chorpita, B. F., & Schiffman, J. (2008). Psychometric properties of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire for children in a large clinical sample. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 37(2), 465-471. doi:10.1080/15374410801955896

 

Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS)

The Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) developed by Spence (1998), is a self-report measure designed to assess the severity of anxiety symptoms in children relating to separation anxiety, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic agoraphobia, generalised anxiety and fears of physical injury. The major sample involved in the acquisition of normative data included 2,052 children, 8-12 years of age, recruited from primary schools in Brisbane, Australia. The scale was primarily developed as most child-report measures of anxiety fail to examine anxiety symptoms that relate to specific anxiety disorders, such as separation anxiety disorder. Secondly, most of the measures available are downward extensions of adult measures of anxiety and are based on the assumptions that childhood anxiety closely resembles adult anxiety (Spence, 1998).

The scale consists of 44 items which can be filled out by the child. Thirty-eight of the items reflect specific symptoms of anxiety, while 6 relate to positive, filler items to reduce negative response bias, such as, “I am the most popular amongst other kids my own age”. The scale is quick and easy to administer, taking only 10 minutes. Items are consistent with specific DSM-IV anxiety disorders. Participants are asked to rate the degree to which they experience a symptom on a 4-point frequency scale, Never, Sometimes, Often and Always. Sample items from the separation anxiety subscale include, “I worry about being away from my parents” and “I feel scared if I have to sleep on my own”. Sample items from the obsessive-compulsive subscale include, “I have to keep checking that I have done things right (like the switch is off, or the door is locked)” and “I have to do some things in just the right way to stop bad things happening” (Spence, 1998).

The total score may be computed from adding together all the subscale scores. The sub-scale scores are computed by adding the individual item scores on the set of items within that domain. Scores within one standard deviation (ie. a T-score of 10) above the mean on any dimension are regarded as being within the normal range on that dimension. A T-score of 60 is indicative of sub-clinical or elevated levels of anxiety. This justifies further investigation and confirmation of diagnostic status using clinical interview.

Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates that the SCAS items load strongly upon the factors that they purport to measure. Internal consistency (reliability) for the total scale is extremely high (.92) confirming that the items of the scale are measuring the same construct. The internal consistency for the subscales is also acceptable, .82 (panic-agoraphobia); .70 (separation anxiety); .70 (social phobia); .60 (physical injury fears); .73 (obsessive-compulsive) and .73 (generalised anxiety). Test-retest reliability was examined in a sample of 344 children who were reassessed after 6-months after the initial data collection which showed a test-retest reliability coefficient of .60. This suggests reasonably high reliability over a 6-month period for the total score. Test-retest reliabilities were lower for the individual subscales, indicating children’s reports of anxiety symptoms tend to decrease after a six-month retest interval. The SCAS total score correlates significantly (.71) with the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS).

Since the development of the SCAS a parent version (Nauta et al., 2004), a pre-school version (Spence, Rapee, McDonald, & Ingram, 2001) and an adolescent version (Spence, Barrett, & Turner, 2003) has been developed, validated and readily available. The SCAS is freely available and provides a measure of anxiety symptoms related to specific anxiety disorders. The SCAS is used in clinical contexts for both assessment and evaluation purposes. It is also used to identify children at risk of developing anxiety problems and for monitoring outcome intervention. The developers of the SCAS stipulate a diagnosis should be made with the addition of a structured clinical interview.

References

Nauta, M. H., Scholing, A., Rapee, R. M., Abbott, M., Spence, S. H., & Waters, A. (2004). A parent-report measure of children’s anxiety: psychometric properties and comparison with child-report in a clinic and normal sample. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42(7), 813-839. doi: 10.1016/S0005-7967(03)00200-6

Spence, S. H. (1998). A measure of anxiety symptoms among children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36(5), 545-566. doi: 10.1016/S0005-7967(98)00034-5

Spence, S. H., Barrett, P. M., & Turner, C. M. (2003). Psychometric properties of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale with young adolescents. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 17(6), 605-625. doi: 10.1016/S0887-6185(02)00236-0

Spence, S. H., Rapee, R., McDonald, C., & Ingram, M. (2001). The structure of anxiety symptoms among preschoolers. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39(11), 1293-1316.

 

 

Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED)

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) was originally developed in the US as a child self-report (8-18year olds) and parent report instrument to screen children with anxiety disorders (Birmaher et al., 1997). An 85-item questionnaire based on the DSM-IV classification of anxiety disorders was generated. It was administered to 341 outpatient children and adolescents and 300 parents who were referrals to a mood/anxiety disorders clinic. Ages ranged from 9-18 years, 59% were female, 82% were Caucasian and 18% African-American. It was reduced to 38 items using item and factor analyses. The SCARED scales map onto specific DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorders, whereby 4 of the scales map directly onto Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Panic Disorder (PD), Separation Anxiety Disorder (SAD), and Social Phobia (SP). The fifth scale is School Anxiety (SA), or School Refusal, while a serious anxiety problem, is not a DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorder (Hale, Crocetti, Raaijmakers, & Meeus, 2011). This is also the case for the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

The SCARED is a paper and pencil test; 10 mins to administer, can be immediately scored, simply by adding the items for each scale. The interpretation indicating which DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorder(s) is at the bottom of the form itself. There is no additional manual. There is a child and parent version of the same form. There are 3 answer choices to select to describe the child in the last 3 months; 0 = Not true or hardly ever true, 1 = Somewhat true or Sometimes true, and 2 = Very true or Often true. Example items:

Child version – When I get frightened it is hard to breathe.  I don’t like to be away from my family.

Parent version  – When my child feels frightened, it is hard for him/her to breathe. My child doesn’t like to be away from his/her family.

The child and parent SCARED both yielded five factors: somatic/panic, general anxiety, separation anxiety, social phobia and school phobia. For the total score and each of the five factors, both the child and parent SCARED demonstrated good internal consistency (α = .74 to .93), test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficients = .70 to.90), discriminant validity (both between anxiety and other disorders and within anxiety disorders), and moderate parent-child agreement (r = .20 to .47, p < .001, all correlations) (Birmaher et al., 1997).

There were very few age, sex or race differences in both parent’ and children’s responses. In the child report, younger children (aged 9 to 12 years, n = 61) had significantly higher separation anxiety scores than older children (>12 years old, n = 280). However no age differences were found on parent report. The child and parent total anxiety scores, generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, panic, and school phobia factors were significantly higher in females than in males (all comparisons p < .05).

There were no significant race differences in the child SCARED. In the parent SCARED, African-American children had significantly higher scores on separation anxiety factor (3.8 ± 3.3 versus 2.6 ± 3.1, t1.297  = 2.0, p = .05, after Bonferroni correction) than Caucasians.

SCARED was further supported as a reliable and valid screening tool for clinically referred children and adolescents with anxiety disorders (Monga et al., 2000). It was tested against the Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC) to determine divergent and convergent validity. The SCARED correlated significantly better with the CBCL’s internalizing factors than with the externalising factors. Additionally, the parent and child forms of the SCARED correlated significantly with the trait and state subscales of the STAIC. Children with an anxiety disorder scored significantly higher on the SCARED than children with depression only or disruptive disorders only (P < 0.05), demonstrating its discriminant validity.

A meta-analysis of the cross-cultural psychometric properties of the SCARED reported on 25 studies predominately from Europe (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands) the USA, South America and China. Psychometric properties were robust for the scales related to the symptoms of the DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorders, that females scored significantly higher than males and that age had a moderating effect on males and female score differences. The meta-analysis suggests that the SCARED can be used as a screening instrument for DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorder symptom dimensions for children and adolescents from various countries (Hale et al., 2011).

The SCARED is available at no cost at www.wpic.pitt.edu/research under tools and assessments, or at www.pediatricbipolar.pitt.edu under instruments. Intended users are clinicians and psychiatrists in screening 8-18 year olds with anxiety disorders. More recently the test has shown promise as a measure of anxiety in paediatric pain (Jastrowski et al., 2012).

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Birmaher, B., Brent, D. A., Chiappetta, L., Bridge, J., Monga, S., & Baugher, M. (1999). Psychometric properties of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): A replication study. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 38(10), 1230–6. doi: 10.1097/00004583-199910000-00011

Birmaher, B., Khetarpal, S., Brent, D., Cully., Balach, L., Kaufman, J., & McKenzie  Neer, S.             (1997). The screen for child anxiety related emotional disorders (SCARED): Scale construction and psychometric characteristics. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,36(4), 545-553. doi: 10.1097/00004583-199704000-00018

Hale, W. W., Crocetti, E., Raaijmakers, Q. A. W., & Meeus, W. H. J. (2011). A meta-analysis of the cross-cultural psychometric properties of the screen for child anxiety related emotional disorders (SCARED). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52(1), 80-90. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02285.x

Jastrowski, M. K. E., Evans, J. R., Tran, S. T., Khan, K. A., Weisman, S. J., & Hainsworth, R. (2012). The psychometric properties of the screen for child anxiety related emotional disorders in pediatric chronic pain. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 37(9), 999-1011. doi: 10.1093/jpepsy/jsso69

Monga, S., Birmaher, B., Chiappetta, L., Brent, D., Kaufman., Bridge, J., & Cully, M. (2000). Screen for child anxiety-related emotional disorders (SCARED): Convergent and divergent validity. Depression and Anxiety, 12(2), 85-91. doi: 10.1002/15206394(2000)12:2<85::aid-da4>3.0.co;2-2