The Short Form of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R-SF): An efficient, reliable, and valid scale for measuring fear in children and adolescents

The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Short Form of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R-SF) in non-clinical and clinically referred children and adolescents from the Netherlands and the United States. Exploratory as well as confirmatory factor analyses of the FSSC-R-SF yielded support for the hypothesized five-factor structure representing fears in the domains of (1) failure and criticism, (2) the unknown, (3) animals, (4) danger and death, and (5) medical affairs. The FSSC-R-SF showed satisfactory reliability and was capable of assessing gender and age differences in youths' fears and fearfulness that have been documented in previous research. Further, the convergent validity of the scale was good as shown by substantial and meaningful correlations with the full-length FSSC-R and alternative childhood anxiety measures. Finally, support was found for the discriminant validity of the scale. That is, clinically referred children and adolescents exhibited higher scores on the FSSC-R-SF total scale and most subscales as compared to their non-clinical counterparts. Moreover, within the clinical sample, children and adolescents with a major anxiety disorder generally displayed higher FSSC-R-SF scores than youths without such a diagnosis. Altogether, these findings indicate that the FSSC-R-SF is a brief, reliable, and valid scale for assessing fear sensitivities in children and adolescents.