Lund University and Skane Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Lund, Sweden.
Department of Developmental Psychology and Education, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain; Department of Developmental Psychology and Didactics, University of Alicante, Carretera San Vicente del Raspeig, s/n-03690, San Vicente del Raspeig, Alicante, Spain.
J Affect Disord. 2022 Aug 1;310:228-234. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2022.05.031. Epub 2022 May 10.
There is a need for a measure that can be used across countries and cultures to advance cross-cultural research about internalizing mental health symptoms in children and adolescents. The Revised Children's Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) is a potential candidate, but no study has examined whether its scales are measured similarly in youth populations from different countries.
In this study, we use confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multi-group CFA to examine the cross-cultural properties of a short and free to use 30-item version of RCADS that assesses social, generalized, panic, and separation anxiety alongside depression and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. We tested the factor structure of RCADS in children and adolescents from Chile, Spain, and Sweden, recruited using different research designs (i.e., school-based studies and an anonymous web survey), and whether the factor structure showed measurement invariance across the three countries.
The proposed factor structure of RCADS showed good model/data fit in all three countries and was superior to a unidimensional model in which correlations among scale items were explained by a single broad internalizing factor. Each RCADS subscale showed adequate to excellent internal consistency in all three countries and multi-group CFA supported scalar invariance across the three countries.
No clinical sample was included.
This study provides an important first step in supporting the use of RCADS in cross-cultural research on depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms in children and adolescents, but more work on validity aspects of the scale across cultures is needed.
需要有一种可以在不同国家和文化中使用的方法来推进关于儿童和青少年内化心理健康症状的跨文化研究。修订后的儿童焦虑和抑郁量表（RCADS）是一个潜在的候选者，但没有研究检验其量表在来自不同国家的青年人群体中是否以相似的方式进行测量。
在这项研究中，我们使用验证性因子分析（CFA）和多组 CFA 来检验评估社交、广泛性、惊恐和分离焦虑以及抑郁和强迫症症状的 30 项短而免费使用的 RCADS 版本的跨文化特性。我们在智利、西班牙和瑞典的儿童和青少年中测试了 RCADS 的因子结构，这些青少年是通过不同的研究设计（即基于学校的研究和匿名网络调查）招募的，并且检验了该因子结构在这三个国家是否具有测量不变性。
RCADS 的提议因子结构在所有三个国家都显示出良好的模型/数据拟合，并且优于单维模型，在单维模型中，量表项目之间的相关性由单个广泛的内化因素来解释。RCADS 的每个子量表在所有三个国家都表现出足够到优秀的内部一致性，多组 CFA 支持该量表在三个国家之间具有标度不变性。
未纳入临床样本。
这项研究为在儿童和青少年的抑郁、焦虑和强迫症症状的跨文化研究中使用 RCADS 提供了重要的第一步，但需要在跨文化方面对该量表的有效性进行更多研究。
