The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): scale construction and psychometric characteristics.
OBJECTIVE
To develop a reliable and valid child and parent self-report instrument to screen children with anxiety disorders.


METHODS
An 85-item questionnaire was administered to 341 outpatient children and adolescents and 300 parents. Utilizing item analyses and factor analyses, the original scale was reduced to 38 items. A subsample of children (n = 88) and parents (n = 86) was retested an average of 5 weeks (4 days to 15 weeks after the initial screening.


RESULTS
The child and parent Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) both yielded five factors: somatic/panic, general anxiety, separation anxiety, social phobia For the total score and each of the five factors, both the child and parent SCARED demonstrated good internal consistency (alpha = .74 to .93), test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficients = .70 to .90), discriminative validity (both between anxiety and other disorders and within anxiety disorders), and moderate parent-child agreement (r = .20 to .47, p < .001, all correlations).


CONCLUSIONS
The SCARED shows promise as a screening instrument for anxiety disorders. Future studies using the SCARED in community samples are indicated.
Birmaher
B
B
Child Psychiatry Department, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Khetarpal
S
S
Brent
D
D
Cully
M
M
Balach
L
L
Kaufman
J
J
Neer
S M
SM
D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D002648:Child; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales / Q000592:standards*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D012372:ROC Curve; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012494:Sampling Studies; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity