Parent/Guardian- and Self-Report Versions of the Irritability Domain of the Concise Associated Symptom Tracking Scale: Evaluation of Psychometric Properties and Potential Clinical Utility in the Texas Youth Depression and Suicide Research Network

Irritability is a common characteristic of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents but is often overlooked by scientific literature and screening tools. This study explores the psychometric value of the five-item irritability domain of the Concise Associated Symptom Tracking (CAST-IRR) scale for male and female youth. Adolescents completed the self-report version of the CAST-IRR, and the authors created an “informant” version of CAST-IRR, which was completed by a parent/guardian. Both versions of CAST-IRR had strong internal consistency and found similar associations for irritability with depression, anxiety, and functional impairment in males and females, indicating the appropriateness of use for both sexes. Similar to other studies where parent-child irritability was compared, there was poor agreement between self- and informant-report versions of CAST-IRR. Self-report CAST-IRR had a stronger association with self-report measures of depression and anxiety, while the informant-report CAST-IRR had a stronger association with informant-report measures of depression and anxiety. Given the ability to capture distinct features of irritability between the two versions, the results suggest that clinicians may consider using both self- and informant-report CAST-IRR scales to comprehensively assess irritability in male and female youth.