Correlations among two self-report questionnaires for measuring DSM-defined anxiety disorder symptoms in children: the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders and the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) and the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) are recently developed self-report questionnaires for measuring DSM-IV defined anxiety disorder symptoms in children. The present study examined correlations among these measures in a large sample of Dutch school children (N=1011). Results showed that there was a strong correlation between the total anxiety scores of these instruments (r=0.89). Furthermore, most of the SCARED subscales were found to be convincingly connected to their SCAS counterparts. Finally, a confirmatory factor analysis revealed that SCARED and SCAS anxiety disorder subscales loaded uniquely on separate but intercorrelated factors (i.e., the DSM-IV anxiety disorder categories). These findings can be taken as evidence for the concurrent validity of the SCARED and the SCAS. Although these measures were developed independently, they seem to measure highly similar constructs, viz anxiety symptoms which can be clustered into the anxiety disorder categories as described in the DSM-IV.