Initial Validation of the Children’s Worry Management Scale

We investigated the psychometric properties of a new instrument, the Children’s Worry Management Scale (CWMS). The CWMS has three subscales that specify methods of regulating worry: inhibition (the suppression of worry), dysregulation (exaggerated displays of worry), and coping (constructive ways of managing worry). Using a Caucasian, middle-class sample of 214 children (M = 9 years, 1 month), Study 1 provides reliability and validity data through patterns of correlations to parent- and child-completed measures of emotion management and behavioral problems. Internal consistencies range from .69 to .74. Study 2 establishes discriminant validity by demonstrating that the CWMS Dysregulation and Coping subscales differentiated, in the expected directions, between a group of children (n = 27) with DSM-IV anxiety diagnoses and a control group of children with no psychological disorders.