The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale - Parent Version: Extended Applicability and Validity for Use with Younger Youth and Children with Histories of Early-Life Caregiver Neglect

The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale - Parent Version (RCADS-P) is a widely used parent-report measure, initially developed to assess anxiety and depression in youth in grades 3–12 from school-based and clinic-referred settings. It is important however to be able to assess these problems in even younger children due to the need for earlier understanding, identification, intervention and prevention efforts of anxiety and depression in younger children, and continual monitoring of these problems across the youth life span. For the present study, we used a sample of 307 children and adolescents ages 3.0 to 17.5 years old (M = 8.68, SE = 4.10). For the first set of analyses, we divided the sample into Younger youth (kindergarten to grade 2; n = 152) and Older youth (grade 3 to 12; n = 155) to see whether each group independently met benchmarks for acceptable reliability and validity. Given the number of children who also develop anxiety and depression following early-life adversities and adverse care (such as caregiver neglect), we also divided our sample differently into a Post-Institutionalized group (i.e., previously institutionalized youth; n = 100) and a Comparison group (i.e., youth without histories of early-life caregiver neglect; n = 195) to examine whether each of these groups also met benchmarks for acceptable reliability and validity. Specifically, in each of these grade and experience groups, we examined the factor structure (including measurement invariance), internal consistency and convergent and discriminant validity of the RCADS-P anxiety and depression scales scores. Results demonstrated that younger youth RCADS-P reports were associated with acceptable reliability and validity estimates. Similar support for the RCADS-P scores was found for the Post-Institutionalized youth. The present study therefore extends needed support for the use of the RCADS-P to assess and monitor these two new and important youth groups.