• Frances J Wren, Eric A Berg, Lynda A Heiden, Carolyn J Kinnamon, Lirio A Ohlson, Jeffrey A Bridge, Boris Birmaher, and M Pilar Bernal.
• Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Stanford University School of Medicine, 401 Quarry Road, Standford, CA 94305-5719, USA. fwren@stanford.edu
• J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2007 Mar 1;46(3):332-40.

ObjectiveTo explore in a multiethnic primary care population the impact of child gender and of race/ethnicity on parent and child reports of school-age anxiety and on the factor structure of the Screen for Childhood Anxiety and Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED).MethodA consecutive sample of 515 children (8 to <13 years) and their parent presenting for primary care completed self-report (C) and parent-report (P) versions of the SCARED-41.ResultsNeither SCARED scores nor parent-child difference varied significantly with race/ethnicity. Predictors of higher SCARED scores were less parental education, younger child age and female gender. Exploratory factor analysis conducted separately for SCARED-C and SCARED-P yielded four factors. There was large variation in factor structure between SCARED-C and SCARED-P and across ethnic and gender subgroups, greatest for somatic/panic/generalized anxiety and Hispanic children.ConclusionsPrimary care triage of anxious children requires data from both the parent and child and must go beyond cross-sectional symptom inventories. Clinicians must elicit from each family their perhaps culturally bound interpretation of the child's somatic and psychological symptoms.

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