Family Accommodation in Pediatric Anxiety Disorders: A Critical Review of Current Measures and Methodology

A growing body of evidence suggests family accommodation (FA) contributes to pediatric anxiety onset, maintenance, and blunted treatment response and has inspired novel treatment approaches. Many measures of FA have been developed in the past two decades, yet their psychometric properties have not been thoroughly examined, compared, and aggregated to inform measurement selection in research and clinical settings. Accurately measuring FA is critical for refining etiological theories of youth anxiety disorders and informing clinical interventions. The current review aims to summarize and critically analyze existing FA measurement tools to inform measure selection and highlight critical weaknesses and areas for future FA measurement research. FA measurements were identified via a search of PsycINFO and PubMed and were evaluated using the criteria for evidence-based assessment (Hunsley & Mash, 2007). Most FA measures demonstrated adequate psychometric properties, suggesting FA measure selection will largely depend upon context, available resources, intended use, and FA subdomains of interest. FA measurement will benefit from additional research using longitudinal methods and more diverse samples.