Evaluation of Mother-Child Agreement and Factorial Structures of the SCARED Questionnaire in an Italian Clinical Sample

Abstract

Background: A great part of the literature has confirmed the importance of both child and parents reports as source of factual information, especially for childhood emotional syndromes. In our study we aimed at: (i) calculating mother-child agreement and (ii) evaluating factorial structure of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) questionnaire in an Italian clinical sample. The novelty of this contribution is two-fold: first, from a clinical point of view, we investigated the parent-child agreement level and examined separately the factorial structures of both parent and child versions of the SCARED for the first time in an Italian clinical sample. Second, unlike previous studies, we used statistical approaches specifically suited to account for the ordinal nature of the collected variables.Method: In a clinical sample of 171 children and adolescents aged 8–18 and their mothers we evaluated inter-rater agreement using weighted kappa indices to assess agreement for each item belonging to a certain SCARED subscale. Exploratory factor analysis for ordinal data was then performed on the polychoric correlation matrix calculated on SCARED items. Differences in the numbers of symptoms reported by children and parents were evaluated as well.Results and Conclusions: Our results reveal moderate to strong mother-child agreement. A significant age effect is present. Two different factorial solutions emerged for parent and child SCARED versions (a 5 factor structure for parents and a 6 factor solution in the child version, including a new factor “Worry about Parents”). This study confirmed the importance of evaluating both child and parent reports in assessment protocols for anxiety disorders. Our findings could help clinicians to determine which information, and from which rater, must be accounted for in evaluating treatment decisions. Moreover, we find that patients characteristics, such as gender and age, should be taken into account when assessing agreement.

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): Informant Discrepancy, Measurement Invariance, and Test–Retest Reliability

“…The current findings indicate that the association between parent and child reports of anxiety on the SCARED questionnaire is on the lower end of prior estimates [5,6,10,38]. Parents tend to report less symptoms than their children overall and this discrepancy was more pronounced in parent-child dyads with a clinically anxious child.…”

“…A child's age is one of the most consistent predictors of discrepant reporting. Reports from younger children are more discrepant from parent-or teacher-reports compared to those of older children [6,7,8,9,10]. Research investigating informant discrepancy as a function of child's sex have yielded mixed results.…”

“…Research investigating informant discrepancy as a function of child's sex have yielded mixed results. Several studies have found no significant differences in informant agreement between girls and boys [6,8,11,12], while others report moderate differences [7,10,13,14]. Ethnicity [8], socioeconomic status (SES [8,14]), parental psychopathology, and a variety of other family-related factors [7,9,14] have also been investigated as potential predictors of discrepancy, though this research has been sparser.…”

The Relationship Among Attributional Style, Mentalization, and Five Anxiety Phenotypes in School-Age Children

“…Screen for child anxiety-related emotional disorders. Children filled in the Italian version of the 41item Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders questionnaire (SCARED) (Ogliari et al, 2006;Scaini et al, 2017), which is a screening instrument for childhood anxiety disorders based on the DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) classification. Children were asked to rate the frequency with which they experience each symptom on a 3-point Likert scale (0 = "almost never," 1 = "sometimes," 2 = "often").…”

Italian validation of the Children’s Shyness Questionnaire: Exploring associations between shyness and psychosocial functioning

“…In order to investigate the presence and severity of anxiety disorders in children, the Screen for Child Anxiety-Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) [50, 51, 52] was used. The SCARED consists of 41 items that evaluate various types of disorders, according to the nosography of the DSM-IV-TR [53]: somatic / panic symptoms, generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, social anxiety and school phobia.…”