Evaluation of an adapted version of the screen for child anxiety related emotional disorders for secondary school students

Abstract

Anxiety is one of adolescents' most frequently experienced mental health issues, but this issue often remains undetected or misdiagnosed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of reliable instruments for screening anxiety disorders among adolescents. For this study, the SCARED scale was translated and adapted to a population of 11 to 15-year-old secondary school students attending church schools in Malta. Based on responses from 120 students, our study found that female students were significantly more prone to developing anxiety than their male counterparts. The study also found that anxiety increases with age. Like several other evaluation studies, our analysis provided a slightly different structure of the scale than the original study suggesting a four rather than a five-factor scale structure. However, the study results were mainly consistent with the findings from most previous studies about the anxiety levels experienced by secondary school students. In addition, the metric characteristics of the scale in our study were satisfactory. Overall, our study found that the SCARED scale could be used routinely to screen and monitor anxiety among secondary school students.