Validation of the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scales (RCADS) and RCADS short forms adapted for adults

Background: The life span nature of anxiety and depression has led to an interest in whether assessments designed for use with children and young people are also valid for adults. The Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scales (RCADS) is a commonly used measure and we aimed to explore its structural validity in adults.

Methods: We examined the factorial validity of the original and two short form versions of the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scales (RCADS) adapted for adults, using confirmatory factor analysis with a convenience sample (n = 371) aged 18-67.

Results: All versions of the RCADS were found to provide reliable measures of general anxiety and depression in adults and of most subdimensions of anxiety corresponding to the original version of the RCADS. However, anxiety subdimension reliability was primarily driven by the strong general anxiety dimension, due to the high comorbidity between anxiety subtypes.

Limitations: We did not include data for children as well as adults in our analyses and small changes were made to the wording of five RCADS items to make them appropriate for adults.

Conclusions: Results suggest that all versions could be helpful for longitudinal and comparative research and evaluation of clinical outcomes, in situations where the focus is on general anxiety and depression, rather than clinical subtypes.