Establishing Normative Anxiety and Depression Levels With PROMIS Parent Proxy Measures

The PROMIS Parent Proxy Measures for anxiety and depression are brief, validated, and freely available tools for assessing childhood anxiety and depressive symptoms. To improve their interpretability, we recruited a nationally representative sample of U.S. parents of children aged 5–17 ( N = 1,213) to report on their child’s anxiety and depressive symptoms using the PROMIS v3.0 measures. Our findings largely validate the PROMIS v3.0 scoring system, with means and medians close to 50. However, we observed narrower standard deviations than the published measure, meaning that some youth not flagged by the existing cutoffs could be experiencing meaningful dysfunction (relative to their peers). We also observed strong floor effects, suggesting that these measures do not differentiate among a large group of youth who are not showing anxiety and depression symptoms. In addition, we present norms by age group and gender, noting that differences emerge in adolescence. We recommend the use of the normative values we present in this study, allowing researchers and clinicians to better understand where a given youth falls within the full distribution of American youth.