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. 2021 May:80:102399.
doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2021.102399. Epub 2021 Apr 15.

Attending to the Attentional Control Scale for Children: Confirming its factor structure and measurement invariance

Dana van Son  1 , Carla E Marin  1 , Panagiotis Boutris  2 , Yasmin Rey  2 , Eli R Lebowitz  1 , Jeremy W Pettit  2 , Wendy K Silverman  3
Affiliations

Attending to the Attentional Control Scale for Children: Confirming its factor structure and measurement invariance

Dana van Son et al. J Anxiety Disord. 2021 May.

Abstract

The Attentional Control Scale for Children (ACS-C) is a widely used self-report questionnaire that measures attentional control in youth. Previous research examined factor-structure and validation of the ACS-C and yielded a 2-factor structure with Attentional Focusing and Attentional Shifting subscales. This study used a confirmatory factor analysis in a large, ethnically diverse sample of clinic-referred anxious youth (N = 442, ages 7-16 years) to compare model fit of three models, the original two-factor model of the ACS-C, a two-factor model of a modified ACS-C (two items re-assigned from Attentional Focusing to Attentional Shifting, three items removed from Attentional Focusing, and two items removed from Attentional Shifting), and a single-factor model. Results reveal best model fit for the two-factor modified ACS-C. This model had strong factorial invariance across sex, partial invariance across ethnicity, and was variant across age. Also, total and subscale scores for the two-factor modified ACS-C correlated with anxiety and depression symptom scale scores, supporting its concurrent validity. Findings confirm the two-factor structure of the modified ACS-C. Future research implications relating to attentional control in children are discussed.

Keywords: Anxious youth; Attentional control; Confirmatory factor analysis.

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