The Arabic Generalized Anxiety Disorder 2 (GAD-2): Psychometric evaluation among mothers of children with intellectual disabilities

Introduction: Disruptive behaviours of children with intellectual disabilities predispose mothers to mental and physical morbidities, leading to caregiving burnout, lower childcare quality, and poor child progress. Methods: This cross-sectional study investigated the psychometrics of the Arabic version of the Generalised Anxiety Disorder 2-item scale (GAD-2) among 85 Saudi mothers of children with intellectual disabilities through latent variable model and receiver-operating characteristic curve analyses. Results: The unidimensional GAD-2 demonstrated good construct validity, invariance at the configural, metric, and scalar levels across age groups, and adequate convergent/divergent validity—It was negatively predicted by high mood and happiness and positively predicted by stress, and it mediated the effect of stress and happiness on depression. Its known-group validity was determined by elevated anxiety levels among mothers using psychotropic drugs. Two cut-offs (≥2.5 and ≥3.5) flagged the best trade-off between sensitivity and specificity for predicting low mood, poor sleep quality, nightmares, high stress, low general physical health, and willingness to join a psychological support program. The positive predictive value for the cut-off ≥3.5 was higher for all outcomes than that of the cut-off ≥2.5. Discussion: The GAD-2 is a valid and reliable tool, which at thresholds ≥3.5 can identify anxious mothers, aiding early diagnosis and intervention.