Do childhood anxiety measures measure anxiety?

Posttraumatic distress in childhood cancer survivors and their parents

“…Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale The Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) is an established, 37-item, self-report inventory of trait anxiety in children [26] with three factors (physiological anxiety, worry and over-sensitivity; and concentration anxiety), with a total scale, and with a lie scale [27]. Internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct and discriminative validity are adequate [28]. The RCMAS was completed by the children only.…”

Worrisome thoughts in children clinically referred for anxiety disorder

“…Biederman et d., 1992;Last, Hersen, Kazdin, Orvaschel, & Perrin, 1991). Emhermore, children with ADHD develop new anxiety disorders at a rate similar to that observed for anxious children over 4 yc~ars (Last, Perrin, Hersen, & Kazdin, in press).…”

“…Participants in the psychopathological control group also were significantly younger than the two anxiety groups, and this may have affected the findings. Previous studies have found younger children to report more fears than older children (see Campbell, 1986), and suggest a similar relation for worry (Silverman et al, 1999. More &mtly, Penin and Last (1992) compared both RCMAS and STAIC-M scores in boys (5-17 years old) with an anxiety disorder only (n = 105) to psychopathological (ADHD; n = 59) and never psychiatrically ill (NP1)controls (n = 49). After controlling for age, children with anxiety and behavior disorder did not differ for total scores on the WonyIOversensitivity scale (4.9 vs. 3.9, respectively).…”

The Relation Between Fears and Anxiety in Children with Specific Phobia and Parental Fears and Anxiety

“…This restriction of range in the questionnaire scores, together with the restricted range of the parental reports on the expressed-fear item, makes it difficult to obtain significant correlations, and may be considered a statistical artifact. Earlier studies have shown that child self-report measures of anxiety have poor discriminative validity (Manassis et al 1997;Perrin and Last 1992), something that might be confirmed by this study. A potential weakness of the present study is the use of the self-reported expressed fear in parents.…”