Abstract
Despite the availability of efficacious treatment and screening protocols, social anxiety disorder (SAD) in adolescents is considerably under-detected and undertreated. Our main study objective was to examine a brief, valid, and reliable social anxiety measure already tested to serve as self-report child measure but administered via Internet aimed at listening to the ability of his or her parent to identify social anxiety symptomatology in his or her child. This parent version could be used as a complementary measure to avoid his or her overestimation of children of social anxiety symptomatology using traditional self-reported measures. We examined the psychometric properties of brief and valid social anxiety measure in their parent format and administered via the Internet. The sample included 179 parents/legal guardians of adolescents (67% girls) with a clinical diagnosis of SAD (mean age: 14.27; SD = 1.33). Findings revealed good factor structure, internal consistency, and construct validity. Data support a single, strength-based factor on the SPAIB-P, being structure largely invariant across age and gender. The limited number of adolescents with a performance-only specifier prevented examining the utility of scale to screen for this recently established specifier. It is crucial to evaluate if these results generalize to different cultures and community samples. The findings suggest that the SPAIB-P evidences performance comparable with child-reported measure. Parents can be reliable reports of the social anxiety symptomatology of the adolescent. The SPAIB-P may be useful for identifying clinically disturbed socially anxious adolescents.
Highlights
Social anxiety disorder is one of the most prevalent childhood psychiatric disorders and tends to be a chronic, stable condition that severely disrupts social and academic functioning (Lijster et al, 2018; Chiu et al, 2021)
Some authors have argued that, given that adolescents with social anxiety disorder often try to make a good impression to mental health providers, the inclusion as informants of parents, teachers, or significant others might contribute to the correct identification of subjects (Garcia-Lopez et al, 2010)
No paper has been published to address the psychometric properties of the parent version of a well-established child-report social anxiety measure
Summary
Social anxiety disorder is one of the most prevalent childhood psychiatric disorders and tends to be a chronic, stable condition that severely disrupts social and academic functioning (Lijster et al, 2018; Chiu et al, 2021). The role of parents as informants of screening for emotional problems in their children has been ignored This may be partially due to the large discrepancies in social anxiety symptomatology found between parents and adolescents (Becker-Haimes et al, 2018; Deros et al, 2018). Some authors have argued that, given that adolescents with social anxiety disorder often try to make a good impression to mental health providers, the inclusion as informants of parents, teachers, or significant others might contribute to the correct identification of subjects (Garcia-Lopez et al, 2010). Our main study objective was to examine psychometric properties of the parent-report version of Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory-Brief form (SPAI-B; GarciaLopez et al, 2008) in a clinical sample of adolescents with SAD
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