Discriminant validity, diagnostic utility, and parent-child agreement on the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) in treatment- and non-treatment-seeking youth

The Screen for Child Anxiety and Related Emotional Disorder (SCARED) may be differentially sensitive to detecting specific or comorbid anxiety diagnoses in treatment-seeking and non-treatment-seeking youth. We assessed the SCARED's discriminant validity, diagnostic utility, and informant agreement using parent- and self-report from healthy and treatment-seeking anxious youth (Study 1, N = 585) and from non-treatment-seeking anxious youth (Study 2, N = 331) diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), or comorbid GAD + SAD. Among treatment-seeking youth, the SCARED showed good diagnostic utility and specificity, differentiating healthy, comorbid, and non-comorbid anxious youth. Child-parent agreement was modest: healthy child self-reports were higher than parent-reports whereas anxious child self-reports were similar or lower than parent-reports. Less consistent results emerged for diagnostic utility, specificity, and informant agreement among non-treatment-seeking youth. Given the number of non-treatment seeking anxious youth (N = 33), generalizability of these findings may be limited. Together, results suggest informants may provide distinct information about children's anxiety symptoms.