The assessment of anxiety and joy at school with the multidimensional anxiety inventory for children and adolescents

The "Multidimensional Anxiety Inventory for Children and Adolescents " (MAICA) is a modular instrument designed to assess both general as well as situation-specific school-related anxieties and joy. This article describes the factor structure, the psychometric properties, and the validity of the three situation-specific modules of the MAICA. With these modules, anxiety (with the subscales emotionality and worry) and joy are measured separately for three school-related situations (taking a test, being together with others in the school yard, presenting something in front of others). Analyses are based mainly on two samples of children and adolescents aged between 8 and 19 years and attending class levels 3 to 10 (sample 1: N = 2594, sample 2: N = 7339). The expected factor structure could be substantiated with both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, respectively. The structure and the measurement properties were invariant with regard to the age and gender of the children. The reliabilities of all subscales were good (Cronbach's alpha between .79 and .93). In addition, all subscales were moderately to highly stable over a period of two to four weeks (r (tt) between .65 and .76). Validity could be established with respect to other anxiety scales and school performance.