Evaluating psychometric validity of ecological momentary assessment for youth irritability

Irritability is a transdiagnostic symptom in youth, leading to long-term adverse consequences. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA), or naturalistic clinical phenotyping, can quantify real-world experiences and affective dynamics of irritability in vivo and may be less contaminated by biases that impact retrospective report measures. However, to date, no research examines the psychometric properties of EMA measures of irritability.

The current study assesses EMA data from N = 49 youth receiving treatment for clinically impairing irritability (Mage = 10.63, 36.73 % female). Analyses evaluate two irritability EMA items and one positive-affect EMA item for within and between person variability, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity.

EMA items demonstrate acceptable psychometric properties including acceptable variability, consistency, reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity. Comparisons to previous work in anxious and healthy youth are discussed.

Study limitations include participants' concurrent involvement in treatment and exclusion of outburst-related EMA measures from study analyses.

These results may facilitate future research with irritability EMA items in clinical populations; future work should validate EMA items psychometrically before use in clinical trials.