Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale: reliability with emotionally disturbed children.

Abstract

The Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale is a brief questionnaire composed of 42 questions that can be answered by yes or no (1). It yields both a measure of anxiety and a measure of the child's tendency to deny common faults (L-scale). Despite interest in utilizing the test to discriminate levels of anxiety in emotionally disturbed children, there are few data available for such children. Before the test could be used as a measure of anxiety for such Ss, its reliability must be demonstrated. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to assess the test-retest reliability of this anxiety scale with 30 emotionally disturbed children (23 males, 7 females) in residential treatment. Their mean age was 11.07 yr., with a standard deviation of 2.00 yr. The test was individually administered to each S at the beginning and end of a 3-mo. period. The difference between mean raw scores on first and second administration did not differ significantly for the anxiety scale (MI = 22.33, SD, = 9.94; M2 = 23.67, SDa = 9.68; t = 1.10, p > .lo); the resulting correlation coefficient of .77 was significant (p .lo) and the resulting correlation of .80 was significant. Such results indicate that scores on the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale were a reliable measure of anxiety over a 3-mo. period for these emotionally disturbed children. If the scale is also valid, then its research use with this population seems to be in order. Further work should be done to determine its validity and efficacy in differentiating levels of anxiety between normal and abnormal popularions. REFERENCE 1. CASTANEDA, A., MCCANDLESS, B. R., & PALERMO, D. S. The children's form of the Manifest Anxiety Scale. Child Deuelopmenr, 1956, 27, 316-317.