The Assessment Scale of School Refusal: Psychometric Quality Criteria and Validation of a modified Version

Objective: Psychometric properties of the original and a modified version of the << Einschetzungsskala der Schulverweigerunge (German version of the School Refusal Assessment Scale, SRAS; Kearney & Silverman, 1993; Overmeyer et al., 1994) were analyzed in order to identify alternative ways to revise the SRAS/ESV compared to the existing revision SRAS-R (Kearney, 2002). The SRAS/ESV consists of a parent and a child version and measures four functions of school refusal (avoidance of negative affect related to school settings, escape from aversive social or evaluative situations, attention-getting behavior, positive tangible reinforcement). Method: Data from N = 124 (parent version) respectively N = 156 (child version) patients of a specialized psychiatric outpatient unit for children and adolescents with school-avoiding behavior were obtained. Analyzes included characteristics of items and scales, face-, factorial-, and construct-validity (correlations with other questionnaires, e.g., YSR, CBCL were analyzed). Results: Many items seem to measure overall anxiety instead of the functional aspects of school refusal, one item measures expansive behavior. Four factors were obtained, but they did not reflect the assumed structure of the ESV (e.g., overlap of the two avoidance-related scales). Post-hoc-analyzes with a modified version (elimination of several items with problematic content validity) suggested three factors, convergent and discriminative validity of the modified version was confirmed. Because only some of the afore-mentioned problems have been addressed in the revised version (SRAS-R; Kearney, 2002), a new revision and extension of the German version of the questionnaire covering more aspects of school avoidance behavior (e.g., bullying, depression, somatic complaints, psychosocial factors) is discussed.