Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale – Child (SCAS-Child)

The SCAS-Child can be used as part of a broader diagnostic assessment, but should not be used as the sole means for diagnosis. The scale can be used in clinical and non-clinical settings to evaluate the impact of anxiety interventions over time.

There is also a parent reported version (SCAS-Parent) of the same assessment. Administering the child and parent reported version and comparing results can be helpful to inform a formulation.

Scores consist of a total raw score (range from 0 to 114) and six sub-scale scores, with higher scores indicating greater severity of anxiety symptoms. These scores are also converted into percentiles based on age and gender from a large normative sample (N = 4,916) reported by Spence (n.d.) and accessible on www.scaswebsite.com. A percentile score more than 84 for any subscale score or the total SCAS score indicates clinically significant anxiety symptoms.

Sub-scales are computed by summing the following items:

• Separation anxiety (items 5, 8, 12, 15, 16, 44)
• Social phobia (items 6, 7, 9, 10, 29, 35)
• Obsessive compulsive (items 14, 19, 27, 40, 41, 42)
• Panic/agoraphobia (items 13, 21, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39)
• Physical Injury (items 2, 18, 23, 25, 33)
• Generalised anxiety (items 1, 3, 4, 20, 22, 24)

Items that are not scored in either the total score or the sub-scale scores are:
11, 17, 26, 31, 38, 43, 45 and 46. They are not scored because they did not meet sufficient psychometric requirements.

If the scale is administered on multiple occasions a graph is produced to track symptoms over time, representing  the respondents scores as a normative percentile.  

The SCAS Child Version has been validated in a large sample of Australian children (N = 4,916) by Spence (n.d.). The SCAS demonstrated convergent validity with other measures of child anxiety, and discriminant validity with a measure of child depressive symptoms (Spence et al., 2003). The same study also showed significantly higher SCAS scores on all six subscales among clinically anxious children than those in a non-clinical control group.

For comprehensive information visit the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale website at: www.scaswebsite.com

For comprehensive information visit the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale website at: www.scaswebsite.com

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