Alexis Nagley 3/1/13 Psy 315 Dr.

Carlin Critique of existing test The purpose of The Picture Anxiety Test (PAT) Psyshchometric Properties in a Community Sample of Young Children by Kathrin Dubi, Kristen L. Lavalle and Saliva Schneider, Looked at the Picture anxiety test which was originally developed for young children as an assessment tool for cognitive and visual skills and wanted to see if they could assess anxiety for this age group as well. The target population for this test was boys and girls ages 4-8. These children were in preschool, kindergarten or primary school. The participants were also all from Basel Switzerland in a community. Most of the children spoke German, allowing the test to be in German. In this test there were 153 children. There were 83 boys and 70 girls. Of these children 68 were in preschool or kindergarten and 85 were in primary school. In this test there was no mention of the socioeconomic status of these children. In this test the nature of the items were selected I think represented the test well. They picked 21 pictures that characterize symptoms of certain phobias. These phobias were social phobia and generalized phobia. With these different pictures the PAT test was able to generate scores for three main features, total anxiety, total avoidance and a score together of anxiety and avoidance. This was able to be done by having a clinician in the area while the child was taking the PAT test and being able to rate them. After this test the children also completed the Revised

Childrens Manifest Anxiety Scale (RMCAS), this consisted of 37 items that measured chronic anxiety. When reading over the test I thought they complimented each other well and really allowed to see if a young child did indeed show signs of anxiety. It is really hard to test in this age so having the test is pictures allowed them to test for something that may otherwise without these tests may be hard to see. The various items they did require not only for just anxiety, but looked into specific anxiety. This allows for the clinicians not only to see if the child has anxiety, but what type of anxiety they have. Doing this I think really covers the basis and making it so their test can really show if a younger child does indeed have anxiety problems. The reliability for the test could have been a little higher, but was really close to the target which is .8 or higher. For internal constancy the Cronbachs apha was .78 for anxiety. In the article they stated that it was a good internal consistency, which is true, but it would have been even stronger if it was over.80. The interrater reliability for anxiety ranged from .83-1.0 with the mean being .96. That is really high and shows from these scores that this test has a high reliability. There test re-test reliability the composite score was .71. This shows that the test re test reliability was acceptable, but could be higher.The convergent validity in this test looked at the PAT test and compared it to the RCMAS test which is more known for tests. The result of this was .002 which is really low considering to have a strong convergent validity you want it to be lower than .6. This means there is a strong correlation between these two tests. For

discriminant validity the test looked at PAT from the three different scales and compared it to the parent teacher reports of the participant they were able to obtain. This correlation was not as significant or high ranging from .08-.11. This is really high considering for there to be discriminant validity the scores should be less than .2. This means there was no real discriminant validity.

Overall I thought the test was interesting in using pictures to tell if a child could have anxiety, but I think there needs to be more tests done before they use this on a lot of younger children. The test was only done to a small amount of children who all not only lived in the same country but all in the same community. This raises a red flag because all of the participants probably come from the same background and style of life and schooling. This makes it hard because these test finding may not be able to portray how other children who are the same age who do not live near them could have done. Also going in none of the children showed any signs of anxiety. It would have been interesting to have some children who did show signs and see how they did. With those area covered I think the test and t be more he finding would make this test more accurate and interesting.