The measurement properties of the spence children's anxiety scale-parent version in a large international pooled sample of young people with autism spectrum disorder.
Use the SCAS-P total score to screen anxiety in autistic youth, but ignore the weak physical-injury subscale and messy six-factor structure.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Magiati et al. (2017) pooled parent reports from many countries. They wanted to see if the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale-Parent (SCAS-P) works for autistic youth.
They checked reliability, validity, and factor structure. The sample was large and international.
What they found
The total score was reliable and valid for screening anxiety in autism. The six-factor structure did not fit well.
The physical-injury subscale was weak. Use the total score, not the subscales.
How this fits with other research
Jitlina et al. (2017) ran a direct replication the same year. They also found the full structure failed in autism. Both papers agree: keep only four subscales—Generalized Anxiety, Separation Anxiety, Panic, and Agoraphobia.
Chowdhury et al. (2016) did similar work with the Home Situations Questionnaire. Like Iliana, they trimmed a parent tool to two clean factors for autism. The pattern is clear: long questionnaires need pruning for this population.
Green et al. (2020) later validated a French stress scale. They too found fewer factors worked better. The theme holds across languages and constructs.
Why it matters
You can trust the SCAS-P total score as a quick anxiety screen in your autism cases. Skip the physical-injury items and don’t try to interpret six subscales. Save time and reduce parent burden by using only the four validated subscales when you need detail.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Anxiety-related difficulties are common in ASD, but measuring anxiety reliably and validly is challenging. Despite an increasing number of studies, there is no clear agreement on which existing anxiety measure is more psychometrically sound and what is the factor structure of anxiety in ASD. The present study examined the internal consistency, convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity, as well as the factor structure of the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale-Parent Version (SCAS-P), in a large international pooled sample of 870 caregivers of youth with ASD from 12 studies in the United Kingdom, United States, and Singapore who completed the SCAS-P. Most were community recruited, while the majority had at least one measure of ASD symptomatology and either cognitive or adaptive functioning measures completed. Existing SCAS-P total scale and subscales had excellent internal consistency and good convergent, divergent and discriminant validity similar to or better than SCAS-P properties reported in typically developing children, except for the poorer internal consistency of the physical injury subscale. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of the existing SCAS-P six-correlated factor structure was a poor fit for this pooled database. Principal component analysis using half of the pooled sample identified a 30-item five correlated factor structure, but a CFA of this PCA-derived structure in the second half of this pooled sample revealed a poor fit, although the PCA-derived SCAS-P scale and subscales had stronger validity and better internal consistency than the original SCAS-P. The study's limitations, the use of the SCAS-P to screen for DSM-derived anxiety problems in ASD and future research directions are discussed. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1629-1652. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1809