A new measure of excessive parental worries about children’s health: Development of the Health Anxiety by Proxy Scale (HAPYS)

Abstract

Objective

Health anxiety by proxy is a newly introduced term to describe parents’ experience of excessive and unpleasant worries about their child’s health. This article describes the development of a new measure, the Health Anxiety by Proxy Scale (HAPYS), for systematic assessment of health anxiety by proxy.

Method

The development of the HAPYS was performed over three phases. (1) Patients clinically assessed to have health anxiety by proxy participated in semi-structured interviews to elaborate their experience of worries regarding their child's health and their related behaviours, and to examine the face validity of items in an existing questionnaire: ‘Illness Worry Scale – parent version’. (2) Based on the findings from Phase 1 the project group and a panel of experts selected and formulated questionnaire items and scoring formats. (3) The HAPYS was pilot-tested twice using cognitive interviewing with healthy parents and parents with health anxiety by proxy followed by further adjustments.

Results

The final version of HAPYS consists of 26 items characteristic of health anxiety by proxy and of an impact section with six items.

Conclusion

Based on the pilot testing the HAPYS showed good face and content validity. It holds the potential to be a valid questionnaire to help clinicians across health care settings assess parents suffering from health anxiety by proxy.

Keywords:

• Measurement
• psychological assessment
• health anxiety
• parents

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Correction

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the parents who participated in the study and acknowledge MD, PhD, Ditte Roth Hulgaard (DRH) for her part in the data analysis in phase 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author note

My co-authors and I do not have any conflicts of interests to disclose. All of the authors listed in the byline have agreed to the order of the byline and to submission of the manuscript.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08039488.2023.2258044)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Central Denmark Region and Aarhus University, Denmark.