Measurement invariance across Genders on the Childhood Illness Attitude Scales (CIAS)

Psychotic experiences are associated with health anxiety and functional somatic symptoms in preadolescence

“…Previous studies on child populations have shown that help‐seeking is an important dimension of HA in this age group loading on a single factor of HA (Thorisdottir et al., ; Wright & Asmundson, ). However, when examining children with PE specifically, we found that they had high scores on fears and impact of symptoms, yet did not report increased help‐seeking behavior.…”

“…Fourth, to reduce the strain on the children during the face‐to‐face examinations, interview evaluation of HA and FSS were not available, and were assessed using only self‐report measures. However, the self‐report measures that were utilized in the current study are the most commonly used and validated self‐report measures for children (Thorisdottir et al., ; Walker et al., ). Furthermore, we cannot preclude that the measure of FSS enquires about somatic symptoms which are in fact part of actual somatic illness in some participants.…”

“…All items are scored on a 3‐point Likert scale, 1 = none of the time, 2 = sometimes, 3 = a lot of the time. The current study used 21 items of the CIAS as recommended in a recent factor analysis (Thorisdottir et al., ), based on two samples from Canada and Denmark, respectively (a sub‐sample of the CCC2000). The 21 items inquire about three subdimensions of HA: (a) fears for example ‘If you have pain, do you worry that it may be caused by a bad sickness?’, (b) help‐seeking for example ‘If pain lasts for a week or more, do you tell your mom or dad?’, and (c) symptom effects (impact of symptoms) for example ‘Do strange feelings in your body stop you from going to school?’ The total score range was 21–63 (11 items on fears scored 11–33, six items on help‐seeking scored 6–18, and four items on symptom impact scored 4–12).…”

“…The 21 items inquire about three subdimensions of HA: (a) fears for example ‘If you have pain, do you worry that it may be caused by a bad sickness?’, (b) help‐seeking for example ‘If pain lasts for a week or more, do you tell your mom or dad?’, and (c) symptom effects (impact of symptoms) for example ‘Do strange feelings in your body stop you from going to school?’ The total score range was 21–63 (11 items on fears scored 11–33, six items on help‐seeking scored 6–18, and four items on symptom impact scored 4–12). The internal consistencies of the three factors were good (fears α = .87, help‐seeking α = .83, and symptom impact α = .74) (Thorisdottir et al., ). No clinically relevant cut‐off points have been established for the CIAS, and we chose to arbitrarily dichotomize the scores into estimated high top 10% and low 90%, in line with our previous study (Rask et al., ).…”

Continuity of health anxiety from childhood to adolescence and associated healthcare costs: a prospective population‐based cohort study

“…At age 11, HA was measured using the CIAS (Wright & Asmundson, 2003), which is a developmentally modified version of the adult measure, the Illness Attitude Scales (Kellner, 1986). We used a 21 items version of the CIAS in the current study, encompassing three factors: fears, help‐seeking behaviour and impact of symptoms (Thorisdottir et al, 2017). All items were scored on a 3‐point Likert scale (1 = none of the time, 2 = sometimes, 3 = a lot of the time), resulting in potential scores from 21 to 63, Cronbach’s alpha .81 in the current study.…”