Measurement of Panic Interpretation Bias Using the Anxiety Interpretation Questionnaire for Children

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the development of a reliable and valid measure for the assessment of panic-relevant interpretations in children. The resulting measure, the Anxiety Interpretation Questionnaire for Children (AIQ-C), presents descriptions of panic-relevant and panic-irrelevant ambiguous scenarios along with several possible interpretations of these scenarios. Child participants are also asked to rate their agreement with various strategies for coping. First, we investigated content validity of this measure by asking a group of experts to rate the relevance of the scenario interpretations. In a second step, reliability and validity of this measure was investigated utilizing a sample of 143 children. In this investigation, the AIQ-C demonstrated good construct, convergent, and discriminate validity as well as adequate internal consistency. The results of this study indicate that the AIQ-C appears to be a reliable and valid measure for the assessment of bodily sensation interpretations associated with panic in children.