European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Background and purpose:
 
Depression and anxiety are of the common psychiatric disorders among the children and their diagnosis and evaluation in children is necessary. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of RCADS among a sample of 10-18 years old children in Golestan.
 
Materials and methods:
 
This survey study had a descriptive purpose with the sample consisting of 399 children aged 10-18 in Golestan selected using multi-stage cluster sampling method who were evaluated using RCADS, Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and Youth Self-Report (YSR). Finally, data was analyzed using descriptive statistic, Pearson correlation coefficient, Cronbach's alpha coefficient and exploratory factor analysis (EFA).
 
Results:
 
The RCADS demonstrated adequate reliability as well as convergent and discriminant validity. The results of EFA showed a six-factor structure that explained 55.30% of the scale variance and was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).The correlation between the RCADS total score and YSR-internalizing subscale and significantly, but at a lower level, with the YSR-externalizing subscale (p<0.01). also, results indicated a significant positive correlation between the total and subscale score RCADS with CDI and YSR- anxiety/depression subscales (p<0.01).
 
Conclusion:
The results showed that this questionnaire has appropriate psychometric characteristics among Iranian children and can be used as a suitable diagnostic tool for use in educational, clinical and research environments.