Examining the Screen for Child Anxiety-Related Emotional Disorder-71 as an assessment tool for anxiety in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders.

The team tested the SCARED-71 anxiety checklist in high-functioning autistic kids. They asked parents and children to fill out the same 71-item form. Then they checked if the scores matched known anxiety levels.

The goal was to see if the regular cutoffs work or if autism skews the numbers.

Parent reports lined up fairly well with clinical anxiety. Child reports did not. Using the usual parent cutoff flagged too many kids as anxious. Raising the cutoff caught the truly anxious ones and cut false alarms.

Adams et al. (2022) saw the same problem with the SRAS-R school-refusal scale. Parents said the standard form missed autism reasons like sensory breaks. Both papers end with the same fix: tweak the tool for ASD.

Van Gaasbeek et al. (2026) found the opposite with the sleep scale SDSC. The five-factor shape held perfectly in 513 autistic youth. The difference is domain: sleep questions behave the same; anxiety questions do not.

Bitsika et al. (2017) add that anxiety looks different by age in ASD. Social tension drives worry in younger boys; routine change drives it in teens. The SCARED-71 does not capture these shifts, so a higher cutoff is only a first step.

You probably screen for anxiety before starting social-skills or CBT groups. If you use the stock SCARED-71 parent cutoff, you may over-identify. Bump the threshold until local data say stop. Pair the score with interview questions about social tension and routine change to sharpen your picture.