Anxiety and fear. Discriminant validity in the child and adolescent practitioner's perspective.
OBJECTIVE
We assessed the ability of child and adolescent practitioners to discriminate between anxiety items from the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) and fear items from the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R). In addition, we examined the effects age, gender, nationality, and therapeutic orientation on discrimination ability.


METHODS
Child and adolescent psychiatrists and psychologists from two university hospitals in Australia and the USA completed a questionnaire comprised of items randomly chosen from the RCMAS and the FSSC-R. Clinicians rated each item on the extent to which the item represented the construct of anxiety or fear, using a 7-point Likert-type scale.


RESULTS
Clinicians were more accurate in their perceptions of anxiety than in their perceptions of fear. Clinicians with a psychodynamic orientation were more likely to perceive an item as describing anxiety, and were less likely to identify fear. There was a significant interaction between age, scale and perception, with the youngest clinicians showing the greatest perceptual differentiation between the fear and anxiety items.


CONCLUSIONS
The results suggest a need to develop common terminology among researchers and clinicians, develop scales with items specific to the pathology they intend to measure, and consider the variables influencing the clinicians rating them.
Pavuluri
Mani N
MN
Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago 60612, USA.
Henry
David
D
Allen
Kathleen
K
D000293:Adolescent; D000296:Adolescent Psychiatry; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001007:Anxiety / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D001315:Australia; D002648:Child; D002665:Child Psychiatry; D016002:Discriminant Analysis; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015588:Observer Variation; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics; D014481:United States