Psychometric Investigation of the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale, Second Edition, Short Form among the Korean Youth Population

Abstract

The Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale, Second Edition (RCMAS-2) has long been used to measure anxiety levels in youth. Its introduction of a 10-item short form has enriched the efficiency and applicability of the scale; however, more re- search is warranted to elucidate its psychometric properties. This study aims to investigate the factor structure and the mea- surement invariance of the RCMAS-2 short form (RCMAS-2 SF) in Korean youth. In total, 1,525 participants from seven different cities of South Korea were included in the analysis (Mean Age = 12.49, SD = 2.54). After randomly assigning partici- pants into two groups, we consecutively performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The results of both analyses demonstrated that pediatric anxiety assessed using the RCMAS-2 SF is composed of two distinct latent factors: physiological anxiety and cognitive anxiety. Furthermore, the results supported strong invariance across gender and age. The RCMAS-2 SF score also showed good indices of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and concurrent validity. These findings highlight that the scale can be widely used as a time-efficient screening tool that enables valid score comparisons between boys and girls of different ages.