There’s a new ahead-of-print paper from Autism in Adulthood about anxiety in autistic adults that evaluates use of the newly-developed Anxiety Scale for Autism-Adults (ASA-A) meant to address limitations of the Anxiety Scale for Children-Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASC-ASD), which is geared toward children, and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), which is geared toward neurotypticals.
Our findings indicate that the Anxiety Scale for Autism-Adults (ASA-A) has promising psychometric properties. Factor analysis indicated that a bifactor solution with orthogonal general and specific factors was an adequate fit and that minimal measurement bias would occur if the scale were treated as unidimensional, so the total score could be used as a valid measure of anxiety. We identified a General Anxiety factor and three group factors (Social Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Anxious Arousal). ROC analysis indicated a score of 28 could be considered an indicative clinical cutoff.