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. 2019 Jun;50(3):473-482.
doi: 10.1007/s10578-018-0854-0.

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): Informant Discrepancy, Measurement Invariance, and Test-Retest Reliability

Brigid Behrens  1 , Caroline Swetlitz  2 , Daniel S Pine  2 , David Pagliaccio  3
Affiliations

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): Informant Discrepancy, Measurement Invariance, and Test-Retest Reliability

Brigid Behrens et al. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev. 2019 Jun.

Abstract

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) is a measure widely used to assess childhood anxiety based on parent and child report. However, while the SCARED is a reliable, valid, and sensitive measure to screen for pediatric anxiety disorders, informant discrepancy can pose clinical and research challenges. The present study assesses informant discrepancy, measurement invariance, test-retest reliability, and external validity of the SCARED in 1092 anxious and healthy parent-child dyads. Our findings indicate that discrepancy does not vary systematically by the various clinical, demographic, and familial variables examined. There was support for strict measurement invariance, strong test-retest reliability, and adequate external validity with a clinician-rated measure of anxiety. These findings further support the utility of the SCARED in clinical and research settings, but low parent-child agreement highlights the need for further investigation of factors contributing to SCARED informant discrepancy.

Keywords: Anxiety; Informant discrepancy; Psychometrics; Reliability; SCARED.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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