The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale: A psychometric investigation with Australian youth

The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) is a 47-item self-report measure intended to assess children's smptoms corresponding to selected DSM-IV anxiety and major depressive disorders. The scale comprises six subscales (e.g., Separation Anxiety Disorder Social Phobia: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Panic Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder: and Major Depressive Disorder). To date, only one normative study of youth has been published with results providing strong initial support lot. tilt: reliability And validity of this new measure (Chorpita, Yim, Moffitt. Umemoto. & Francis 2000). The present investigation provides additional psychometric data derived from an Australian sample comprising 405 youth aged 8 to 18 years. In general, the data were found to he consistent with those reported in the initial normative study, Internal consistency for the scale and its subscales was found to be adequate. Good Convergent validity was demonstrated through moderate to strong correlations between the subscales of the RCADS with scores on the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) and the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI). Confirmatory factor analysis suggested reasonable fit tor the six-factor model by Chorpita et al. (2000), Notwithstanding the need for additional validation, It IN concluded that the RCADS is a promising instrument for use in both clinical and research settings.