The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths as an Outcome Measure in Community Mental Health: Factor Analysis and a Validation of the Short Form

Abstract

The goal of the study was to create a short-form measure based on the child and adolescent needs and strengths assessment tool. The measure was designed to be short and easy to use, relevant to youth treated in community-based mental health settings, useful for both treatment planning and program evaluation, and psychometrically valid. Factor analyses of the chosen items revealed two mental health factors and four functioning factors. The mental health factors included internalization and externalization, and the functioning factors included family, social, caregiver, and educational functioning. In support of validity, internalization and externalization subscales distinguished between clients diagnosed with internalizing and externalizing disorders and correlated with caregiver and self-report scores on the Youth Outcome Questionnaire.

Overview of Ten Child Mental Health Clinical Outcome Measures: Testing of Psychometric Properties with Diverse Client Populations in the U.S.

“…Three different variations of CANS were tested: a mental health scale (Anderson et al, 2003 ), a short form (Alamdari & Kelber, 2016 ), and a trauma screener (Kisiel et al, 2018 ). Anderson et al ( 2003 ) found high interrater reliability between caseworkers and researchers on the mental health scale but did not address validity.…”

“…Anderson et al ( 2003 ) found high interrater reliability between caseworkers and researchers on the mental health scale but did not address validity. The short form showed good concurrent validity with Y-OQ’s somatic and behavior dysfunction subscales (Alamdari & Kelber, 2016 ), while the trauma screener showed good convergent and discriminant validity when compared to TSCC-A and CBCL (Kisiel et al, 2018 ).…”

Creating the necessary infrastructure for a trauma-informed system of care for children and youth

“…Research has documented that the CANS is reliable at the item level allowing notable analytic flexibility (e.g., Anderson et al, 2003 ; Lyons, 2009 , 2022 ). A substantial body of research is developing demonstrating the validity of the CANS in behavioral health, child welfare, and justice settings (Alamdari and Kelber, 2016 ; Juades et al, 2016 ; Vreeland et al, 2020 ; Hong et al, 2021 ). A part of the trauma-informed version of the CANS is a 13-item no/yes coding of trauma experiences as follows:…”