[Childhood anxiety and assessment instruments: a systematic review].
OBJECTIVE
To make a survey of the principal anxiety instruments available for children, when they appeared, the type of methods used, verifying which countries have the highest number of children anxiety instruments and also how is the Brazilian reality on this matter.


METHODS
A systematic review on electronic databases--Psychoinfo (1940--May 2002), Psyclit (1887--May 2002), Medline (1966--May 2002) e Eric (1966--May 2002). Information collected on personal communications and books chapters. The inclusion criterion utilized: studies realized with children, where the anxiety were evaluated with some psychometric instrument. The exclusion criterion: adolescents, adults and animal research articles, articles utilizing projective instruments or studies without any reference of assessment instruments. The indexed articles found in 2 or more databases were considered only once.


RESULTS
This review pointed out 1911 studies used at least one assessment instrument to identify the presence of anxiety and 118 instruments were used for this purpose.


CONCLUSIONS
There are a large number of children anxiety instruments available, however, in Brazil, the only one available in the market isn't updated and the modern ones are found only in clinic academic centers.
da Silva
Wildson Vieira
WV
Universidade Católica de Pelotas, Brasil. wildsons@terra.com.br
de Figueiredo
Vera Lúcia Marques
VL
D001007:Anxiety / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D011594:Psychometrics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000145:classification