Comparing approaches for categorizing measure reliability in the assessment of anxiety in older adults

A systematic review of the anxiety measures most commonly used with older adults found that most are developed for a younger population and lacked sufficient evidence of their psychometric properties when used with an older population. As researchers and clinicians need a fast way to judge whether a measure is appropriate when faced with daily assessment tasks, recent efforts have been made in developing guidelines to operationalize the criteria necessary to designate a measure as evidence-based. The goal of this study is to: (a) apply the reliability criteria for two existing evidence based assessment categorization systems to the most commonly used anxiety measures with older adults and (b) compare the results of these categorization systems to the results obtained in a previous reliability generalization study that gave the mean reliability of each measure. We discuss the strengths and limitations of both approaches and suggest how researchers and clinicians can identify psychometrically sound measures without having to conduct more labour-intensive meta-analysis studies.