Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESReliability and Validity of Parent and Child Versions of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children in Community Samples
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.