Comparisons of the Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance of the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale-Parent Version in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typically Developing Anxious Children.
Magdalena Glod, Cathy Creswell, Polly Waite and 4 others
PMID 28393292WHAT IT FOUND
The parent-report Spence Children's Anxiety Scale did not divide into the expected anxiety types in children with autism or anxious children without autism.
Do not use section scores alone to compare groups or identify anxiety types.
Key findings
01The questionnaire did not fit the expected anxiety sections well in either group, so testing whether it measured anxiety the same way in both groups was not done.
02When researchers explored the data without forcing the original structure, the autism group produced six groupings and the anxious group produced seven, and these did not match the original sections.
03Panic and agoraphobia items split into two different groupings in both groups, and obsessive-compulsive items split into two groupings in the anxious group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The anxious group came from a clinic referral sample, and the autism group came from several different studies, so the way participants were selected may have affected the results. Parents completed the questionnaire, and the authors note parents may not know all anxiety-related behaviours or their severity, especially for children with autism. The study analysed existing data rather than collecting a new dataset, and missing data were handled by imputation after removing three participants with many missing answers. It tested how scores group together, not whether any treatment helped anxiety.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that the SCAS-P cannot be used at all in autism. The authors suggest it may still be useful as a total-score screening tool, but its section scores should not be used to compare groups or identify anxiety subtypes.