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The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): Informant Discrepancy, Measurement Invariance, and
Brigid Behrens1, Caroline Swetlitz2, Daniel S Pine2
1Emotion and Development Branch, The National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, 20892, USA. brigid.behrens@nih.gov.
Abstract:
The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) is a measure widely used to assess childhood anxiety based on parent and child report. However, while the SCARED is a reliable, valid, and sensitive measure to screen for pediatric anxiety disorders, informant discrepancy can pose clinical and research challenges. The present study assesses informant discrepancy, measurement invariance, test-retest reliability, and external validity of the SCARED in 1092 anxious and healthy parent-child dyads. Our findings indicate that discrepancy does not vary systematically by the various clinical, demographic, and familial variables examined. There was support for strict measurement invariance, strong test-retest reliability, and adequate external validity with a clinician-rated measure of anxiety. These findings further support the utility of the SCARED in clinical and research settings, but low parent-child agreement highlights the need for further investigation of factors contributing to SCARED informant discrepancy.
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