The revised version of the screen for anxiety related emotional disorders (SCARED-R): A new scale for measuring childhood anxiety

Abstract

This chapter provides a description of the “Revised” version of Screen for Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED-R), summarizes its psychometric properties, and then illustrates the practical value of the scale in an early intervention frail for anxiety-disordered children. The original SCARED consists of 38 items that can be allocated to five anxiety subscales. Four of these subscales represent anxiety disorders as classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), namely panic disorder, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and separation anxiety disorder. The fifth subscale is school phobia can best be considered as a separate anxiety disorder in children and adolescents. To cover the anxiety disorders listed in the DSM more fully, the SCARED is revises in three ways. First, school phobia items were added to the separation anxiety disorder subscale. This was done because, in the DSM-IV, school phobia is considered as a potential symptom of separation anxiety disorder. Second, 15 new items were created and added in an attempt to assess the three most important types of specific phobias, i.e., animal phobia, blood-injection-injury phobia, and situational/environmental phobia. Finally, although post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder are relatively rare among children and adolescents, 13 additional items were added in order to measure symptoms of these anxiety disorders. In total, the revised SCARED (SCARED-R) consists of 66 items that measure symptoms of the entire spectrum of anxiety disorders that according to the DSM may occur in children and adolescents. Thus, the SCARED-R measures symptoms of separation anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social phobia, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic or acute stress disorder.