Brief Report: Testing the Psychometric Properties of the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS) and the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Sophie Carruthers, Rachel Kent, Matthew J Hollocks and 1 others
PMID 30334126WHAT IT FOUND
In boys with ASD, common parent and child anxiety questionnaires separated those with an anxiety diagnosis from those without, but published cut-offs did not work well.
Do not use the usual cut-offs.
Key findings
01Boys with an anxiety diagnosis scored higher than boys without an anxiety diagnosis on parent and child versions of both questionnaires.
02Alternative cut-offs were lower for child reports (SCARED 21 instead of 30, SCAS 13 instead of 33) and mixed for parent reports (SCARED 38 instead of 21, SCAS 24 unchanged).
03Adding parent report to child report improved prediction, but adding child report to parent report did not improve prediction.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small: 49 participants with complete data were analysed, and 48 remained after one exclusion. All participants were boys aged 10 to 16 years with IQ 70 or higher, so the findings do not cover girls, younger children, or people with lower IQ. Anxiety diagnoses came from parent report on the CAPA, not from child report. Published cut-offs were applied to an ASD sample without age-stratified cut-point analyses; only 4 boys were 16 years old. The study did not prevent parents and children from completing questionnaires together and did not examine parental education or socioeconomic status.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that these questionnaires can diagnose anxiety in boys with ASD using published cut-offs. The cut-offs were not valid in this sample, and some older boys with anxiety diagnoses scored very low on child self-report.