Psychometric Evaluation of the Rage Outbursts and Anger Rating Scale in an Outpatient Psychiatric Sample

Abstract

The primary objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of a measure of anger/rage attacks-the Rage Outburst and Anger Rating Scale (ROARS)-in a sample of youth (n = 81, ages 7-17 years, 72.8 % male) receiving treatment at an outpatient pediatric psychiatric clinic. A trained rater completed the ROARS and Clinical Global Impression-Rage (CGI-Rage). Children completed the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale for Children and Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Parents completed the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale for Parents. Internal consistency (a = .89), inter-rater reliability (j = .94) and 1-week testretest reliability (r = .72) were calculated for the ROARS. The ROARS was correlated with CGI-Rage (r = .68, q \ .001), although not with parent-and child-rated anxiety symptoms or with child-rated depressive symptoms. Implications regarding clinical utility of the ROARS and directions for future research are discussed.

Understanding and managing obsessive-compulsive disorder in children and adolescents.

“…Rage episodes are common in children with OCD, and are one of the driving forces that increase family accommodation (Storch et al, 2012). This measure has shown good internal consistency, convergent validity, and divergent validity from symptom measures in samples of children with OCD (Storch et al, 2012) and other psychiatric conditions (Johnco et al, 2015;Nadeau et al, 2016).…”