Psychometric properties of the social anxiety subscale of the Youth Anxiety Measure for DSM-5 (YAM-5-I-SAD) in a clinical sample of Spanish-speaking adolescents.

BACKGROUND: The Youth Anxiety Measure-I for DSM-5 has recently been developed to assess youth's anxiety symptomatology. As social anxiety is one of the most common disorders in adolescence, this scale includes a subscale measuring social anxiety. However, psychometric properties of the YAM-5-I social anxiety subscale (YAM-5-I-SAD) in clinical samples are lacking. This paper aims to bridge the gap. METHODS: The sample comprised 24 clinically diagnosed and 24 healthy control Spanish-speaking adolescents aged 14-17 years. RESULTS: Data revealed that the YAM-5- I-SAD yielded excellent sensitivity, which makes it particularly useful as a screening tool to early detect socially anxious adolescents. In addition, the YAM-5-I-SAD evidenced good internal consistency and construct validity. LIMITATIONS: Data are limited to the social anxiety subscale. CONCLUSIONS: The YAM-5-I-SAD is a sensitive and specific measure to screen for adolescents with social anxiety.

Psychometric properties of the Youth Anxiety Measure for DSM-5, Part I (YAM-5-I) in a community sample of Spanish-speaking adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental disorders in adolescence. There is a need for brief screening tools to identify adolescents at risk for anxiety disorders. The Youth Anxiety Measure for DSM-5 has been recently developed to assess youths' anxiety symptoms in terms of the current classification system. The goal of this study is to provide a first test of its psychometric properties in a community sample of adolescents in Spain. METHODS: The sample consisted of 505 13- to 17-year-old adolescents who completed Part I of the YAM-5 (YAM-5-I), which measures symptoms of the major anxiety disorders. RESULTS: Data indicated that the YAM-5-I displays appropriate internal consistency reliability. In addition, support was also found for the construct validity of the measure: most items loaded on a factor that represented the hypothesized anxiety syndromes, although it should also be noted that some items exhibited issues and therefore had to be discarded. LIMITATIONS: Cross-cultural and trans-national studies are needed to determine psychometric properties of scale across languages and cultures. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that the YAM-5-I has satisfactory psychometric properties, which indicates that it can be used as a screening tool in Spanish-speaking adolescents from the general population.

Brief Measures to Screen for Social Anxiety in Adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) in adolescents is considerably underdetected and undertreated despite the availability of efficacious treatments. Our main study objective was to examine brief, valid, and reliable screening measures for adolescent social anxiety, and to then conduct diagnostic interviews to evaluate the measures' ability to identify adolescents with SAD. METHODS: We examined 7 brief and valid social anxiety measures and compared their diagnostic accuracy with diagnoses established by a semistructured interview. The sample included 421 Spanish adolescents with and 613 without a clinical diagnosis of SAD. RESULTS: Data revealed that short social anxiety measures are accurate in detecting Spanish-speaking socially anxious adolescents. All questionnaires showed good or excellent discriminating ability, with the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A) and the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory-Brief (SPAI-B) having the best sensitivity and specificity values, respectively. Excellent areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves were found for most measures, except for the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale for Children and Adolescents and the Mini-Social Phobia Inventory, which had good discriminatory ability. There was little statistical difference in the ability of the brief social anxiety measures to identify cases accurately, although the SPAI-B cutoff score yielded the best balance between sensitivity and specificity and the highest Youden Index. CONCLUSION: Overall, results suggest that brief measures for social anxiety symptoms can be effective in detecting SAD in Spanish-speaking adolescents. Depending on the purpose of the study, SAS-A may be especially useful for reducing false negatives and the SPAI-B for false positives.