ARTICLES
Reliability and Validity of Parent and Child Versions of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children in Community Samples

https://doi.org/10.1097/01.chi.0000246065.93200.a1Get rights and content

ABSTRACT

Objective

To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC), which measures physical symptoms, harm avoidance, social anxiety, and separation/panic.

Method

Using a community sample of Australian children (8-13 years old), the internal stability, factor structure, and convergent validity of child- and parent-report versions of the MASC were examined. A total of 499 children participated at time 1, which represented 18% of children invited to participate; 91% were retained at 12-month follow-up.

Results

Moderate to strong internal reliability was exhibited across all MASC subscales, and support was found for the original four-factor structure of the measure. A higher-order anxiety factor was found to account for the intercorrelation between the four factors. Low parent-child agreement was found on the MASC, whereas correlations between the MASC and the Spence Children's Anxiety Scales demonstrated good convergent validity within reporter (excepting the harm avoidance scale). Scores over a 12-month period showed greater stability for parent reports than for child reports.

Conclusions

This study is the first to demonstrate that the factor structure of the MASC holds for both child and parent reports of anxiety. The MASC is useful for directly comparing symptom reporting across children and parents during clinical assessment. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry, 2007;46(2):224-232.

Section snippets

Participants

The sample at time 1 consisted of 236 boys and 263 girls with an average age of 10.36 years (SD = 1.24; range, 8.00-13.38 years; grades 3-7), recruited from 16 schools across Sydney, Australia. The primary caretaker(s) of the child included parents (85.1%), the mother only (13.6%), the father only (1.1%), and the grandparents (0.2%). In most cases, the child's mother completed the questionnaire (92.5%). All of the schools were located in the greater Sydney area, a city with a population of 4.3

RESULTS

Means, SDs, and 5% to 10% cutoffs are presented in Table 1 for boys and girls in the 8- to 13-year-old age group. The cutoffs identify the scores of children who had the highest reported symptoms on child and parent reports and may be used by clinicians as a guide for identifying children in the clinical range of anxiety problems. Child report results were compared to the MASC nonreferred standardization sample (8-15 years; March, 1997). Parent report was unable to be compared because there was

DISCUSSION

The aim of this study was to replicate and extend previous research examining the basic psychometric properties of the MASC in a community sample of children (8-13 years old). We sought to investigate whether a parent-report version of the MASC conformed to the factor structure of the original child-report version. We also tested whether a higher-order anxiety factor could account for the considerable overlap between anxiety symptom categories.

The results of the CFA indicated that the

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    Disclosure: The authors have no financial relationships to disclose.

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