[Can children describe their fears? An interview study on the comparative assessment of childhood fears by behavioral observation, by the children themselves, teachers and mothers].

Many studies on the anxiety of children are based on the judgement of others, and next to the reports of parents, those of nursery school teachers and teachers are the main sources. Young children are rarely directly questioned because of psychometric problems (little consistency of children's judgement). Thus, the way of data collection used in the present study is unusual with small children: they were allowed to speak for themselves. 128 pre-school children (4;5-6;9) were interviewed and they reported about their preferences, desires, fears, anxieties and about their relationship with their playmates. The children's self-descriptions, resulting from the interviews, were correlated with the anxiety score values of a behavioral study and with the judgements of the nursery school teachers and the reports of their mothers. The present study could show a considerable correspondence between the children's self-description, the behavioral study and the nursery school teachers' judgement. This result is a further argument in favour of the standardized interview being indeed an additional possibility to get more information about the extent and the nature of older pre-school children's anxieties.