Increasing the Efficiency of Diagnostic Interviews for Childhood Anxiety Disorders Through Joint Child-Parent Administration

Structured and semi-structured diagnostic interviews (SDIs) are widely used to gather diagnostic information and have important utility in both research and clinical settings. However, when youth are being assessed, SDIs increase the demands on time or personnel resources and often result in high rates of discordance between informants. In the current study, the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule (ADIS) was administered jointly to 89 youth and their parents. All 89 youth had also participated in a clinical evaluation prior to their enrollment in the study. A subset of these evaluations included the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview for Children and Adolescents (MINI-KID) while the remainder included unstructured interviews. The jointly administered ADIS was found to be reliably administered and demonstrated good convergent and divergent validity. The MINI-KID – selected due to its comprehensiveness, brief administration time, and sound psychometric properties – also demonstrated validity and agreement with the ADIS. Additionally, the inclusion of the MINI-KID in the clinical evaluations increased the specificity of diagnoses included in the medical record. The current study provides preliminary support for the joint, caregiver-child administration of the ADIS and the MINI-KID in both clinical and research settings. The use of these measures could reduce resource demands in research settings and increase the validity of diagnoses offered following intake sessions in clinical settings.