Background: With 10 to 20% of Canadian children suffering with mental illness, the importance of early identification and accurate assessment systems is clear. Unfortunately, many do not receive the mental health treatment necessary and wait-times for assessment can span up to a year. In response, the interRAI suite of assessments were designed to comprehensively assess early signs of mental health impairments in children from birth to 18 years. Methods: This study assesses the psychometric properties of the Anxiety Scale and addresses the identification of anxiety within children diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD); a commonly underrepresented sample in mental health psychometric studies. Data was collected from children aged 4-18 years in three different samples. Results: Results indicated reliable internal consistency and factor structure, as well as moderate-to-strong convergent validity. Conclusions: We conclude that the Anxiety Scale exhibits psychometric qualities which demonstrate its clinical utility for use within a child sample, as well as in children with IDD. The findings provide support to a larger body of research which show consistent psychometric rigour of the interRAI measures.
CITATION STYLE
Stewart, S. L., Babcock, S. E., Li, Y., & Dave, H. P. (2020). A psychometric evaluation of the interRAI Child and Youth Mental Health instruments (ChYMH) anxiety scale in children with and without developmental disabilities. BMC Psychiatry, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02785-9
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