Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Apr;40(2):93-105.
doi: 10.1007/s10566-010-9125-3. Epub 2010 Oct 6.

The Utility of Clinicians Ratings of Anxiety Using the Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS)

Golda S Ginsburg  1 , Courtney P Keeton  1 , Tess K Drazdowski  1 , Mark A Riddle  1
Affiliations

The Utility of Clinicians Ratings of Anxiety Using the Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS)

Golda S Ginsburg et al. Child Youth Care Forum. 2011 Apr.

Abstract

Clinician ratings of anxiety hold the promise of clarifying discrepancies often found between child and parent reports of anxiety. The Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS) is a clinician-administered instrument that assesses the frequency, severity, and impairment of common pediatric anxiety disorders and has been used as a primary outcome measure in several landmark treatment trials. However, no data on nonanxious youth have been published. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by examining clinician's ratings of anxiety on the PARS in a volunteer sample of youth without anxiety disorders (n = 84; ages 7-12; 51% female, 75% Caucasian). The nonanxious sample was comprised of youth with (At-risk; n = 36) and without (Healthy; n = 48) anxious parents. Data were also used to evaluate the reliability (i.e., internal consistency), convergent, and divergent validity of the clinician-rated PARS. In addition, a receiver operating curve analysis was used to determine optimum cut off scores indicative of clinical levels of anxiety by comparing PARS scores between these nonanxious youth and a clinically anxious sample (n = 77) randomized in the Research Units of Pediatric Psychopharmacology (RUPP) anxiety study (RUPP 2001). Results indicated that anxious and nonanxious youth were significantly different on all PARS severity items. Optimum cutoff scores of 11.5 (5-item total score) and 17.5 (7-item total score) discriminated youth with and without anxiety disorders. Cronbach alphas for the Healthy and At-risk sample were .90 and .91 and .75 and .81 for the 5- and 7-item total PARS scores respectively, supporting the measure's internal consistency among nonanxious youth. PARS total scores were positively correlated with other measures of anxiety (i.e., the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders) for the At-risk but not Healthy subsample. PARS scores were not significantly correlated with depressive symptoms (i.e., Children's Depression Inventory). Overall, findings support the utility of clinician's assessments of anxiety symptoms for nonanxious youth. Using the PARS can help facilitate determining whether a child's anxiety level is more similar to those with or without an anxiety disorder.

Keywords: Adolescents; Anxiety; Assessment; Children; Rating scales.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Birmaher B, Brent DA, Chiappetta L, Bridge J, Monga S, & Baugher M (1999). Psychometric properties of the screen for child anxiety related emotional disorders (SCARED): A replication study. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 38(10), 1230–1236. - PubMed
    1. Birmaher B, Khetarpal S, Brent D, Cully M, Balach L, Kaufman J, et al. (1997). The screen for child anxiety related emotional disorders (SCARED): Scale construction and psychometric characteristics. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 36(4), 545–553. - PubMed
    1. Clark DB, & Donovan JE (1994). Reliability and validity of the Hamilton anxiety rating scale in an adolescent sample. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 33(3), 354–360. - PubMed
    1. Comer JS, & Kendall PC (2004). A symptom-level examination of parent–child agreement in the diagnosis of anxious youths. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 43(7), 878–886. - PubMed
    1. Engel NA, Rodrigue JR, & Geffken GR (1994). Parent–child agreement on ratings of anxiety in children. Psychological Reports, 75(3), 1251–1260. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources