Development of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale - Short Version (SCAS-S)

• DOI: 10.1007/s10862-017-9637-3
• Publication Date: 2017-11-21T03:46:56Z
• Authors: Johan Ahlen; Sarah Vigerland; Ata Ghaderi
• Keywords: Convergent validity; Sample (material)

The literature provides several examples of anxiety symptoms questionnaires for children. However, these generally contain many items, and might not be ideal screening in large populations, or repeated testing clinical settings. Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS) is an extensively used evaluated 44-item questionnaire developed to assess children, a sound base the development abbreviated questionnaire. Although methodological standards have been presented how develop questionnaires, previous studies often suffered from limitations regarding validating procedures. Guided by standards, current study aimed at developing version SCAS, while retaining content, convergent, divergent validity original scale. A school-based sample (n = 750) was reduce number independent 371) together with 93), were validate SCAS contained 19 it showed clear factor structure as sample, performed good classification accuracy, validity. In our view, very alternative scale especially younger initial screening, order response burden.