The Arabic Generalized Anxiety Disorder 2 (GAD-2): Psychometric evaluation among mothers of children with...

Disruptive behaviours of children with intellectual disabilities predispose mothers to mental and physical morbidities, leading to caregiving burnout, lower childcare quality, and poor child progress.

This cross-sectional study investigated the psychometrics of the Arabic version of the Generalised Anxiety Disorder 2-item scale (GAD-2) among 85 Saudi mothers of children with intellectual disabilities through latent variable model and receiver-operating characteristic curve analyses.

The unidimensional GAD-2 demonstrated good construct validity, invariance at the configural, metric, and scalar levels across age groups, and adequate convergent/divergent validity-It was negatively predicted by high mood and happiness and positively predicted by stress, and it mediated the effect of stress and happiness on depression. Its known-group validity was determined by elevated anxiety levels among mothers using psychotropic drugs. Two cut-offs (≥2.5 and ≥3.5) flagged the best trade-off between sensitivity and specificity for predicting low mood, poor sleep quality, nightmares, high stress, low general physical health, and willingness to join a psychological support program. The positive predictive value for the cut-off ≥3.5 was higher for all outcomes than that of the cut-off ≥2.5.

The GAD-2 is a valid and reliable tool, which at thresholds ≥3.5 can identify anxious mothers, aiding early diagnosis and intervention.