Psychometric Properties of the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale with an Iranian Sample

The spence children's anxiety scale (scas) is proposed tomeasure anxiety in 6-12 years old based on the apa (dsm-iv, 1994)classification system. the scale includes six correlated factors ofseparation anxiety, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive, panic withagoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and fear of physical injury.the scale was validated using a confirmatory-exploratory factoranalysis for the age range of 8-12 and 7-19. further, it has beenstandardized in the netherlands, australia, japan, germany, england,new zealand, and austria, demonstrating high reliability and validity.the present study examined its use with 417 male and female studentsaged 6-12 years old in tehran, iran. the confirmatory factor analysis ofsix uncorrelated factors supported the six hypothesized factors, withstrong internal consistency of subscales and the total score andindicated a good fit index for six factors. the chi-square value alsoexplains the covariance of the data. an exploratory factor analysis wasalso performed using varimax original and rotative indices which isconsistent with the proposed factor structure. the cronbach alpha calculated for the internal reliability of the scale and the internalconsistency of the total score was high, which is consistent with theresults reported by other investigators. the results of this study haveshown that the seas has suitable psychometric property among theiranian primary school children and it is probably a clinically valuabletool in the assessment of childhood anxiety.