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Psychometric properties of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): a replication study
B Birmaher1, D A Brent, L Chiappetta
1Division of Child Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. birmaherb@msx.upmc.edu
Objective:
To replicate and extend work on the psychometric properties of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED), a child and parent self-report instrument used to screen for children with anxiety disorders.
Method:
The 41-item version of the SCARED was administered to a new sample of 190 outpatient children and adolescents and 166 parents. The internal consistency, discriminant, and convergent validity were assessed. In addition, using discriminant function analysis, a briefer version of the SCARED was developed.
Results:
Using item analyses and factor analyses on the 41-item version, 5 factors were obtained: panic/somatic, generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, social phobia, and school phobia. In general, the total score and each of the 5 factors for both the child and parent SCARED demonstrated good internal consistency and discriminant validity (both between anxiety and depressive and disruptive disorders and within anxiety disorders). A reduced version of the SCARED yielded 5 items and showed similar psychometrics to the full SCARED.
Conclusions:
In a new sample, the authors replicated their initial psychometric findings that the SCARED is a reliable and valid instrument to screen for childhood anxiety disorders in clinical settings. Furthermore, pending future research, the 5-item SCARED appears to be a promising brief screening inventory for anxiety disorders in epidemiological studies.
