Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children

The PSWQ-C is a 14-item self-report questionnaire designed to assess worry in children and adolescents aged seven to seventeen. The questionnaire was designed to be comprehensible to children at the second grade reading level and above.

Respondents are asked to indicate how often each item applies to them by choosing from the following responses for each item: “never,” “sometimes,” “often,” and “always.” Their responses are scored on a 4-point Likert scale from 0 (never) to 3 (always). Items 2, 7, and 9 are reverse-scored from 0 (always) to 3 (never), with greater scores indicating less worry rather than greater worry. Subsequently, item scores are summed to yield a total score. Total scores range from 0 to 42, with higher scores indicating greater tendency to worry.

PSWQ-C has also been found to have good internal reliability, with Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from .89 to .91 (for community samples and a Cronbach alpha coefficient of .82 for a large clinical sample. In both community and clinical samples, the PSWQ-C has shown high convergent validity with other assessment measurements for worry including the worry/oversensitive measure of the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS), Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) and the revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS).

The PSWQ-C has also demonstrated favourable test-retest reliability; re-test after 1 and 3 weeks test-retest correlation coefficient of r=.92, r = .83 respectively. Finally, the PSWQ-C has demonstrated to be valid in cross cultural populations, yielding good psychometric properties in community samples in France, Denmark and Korea.