Assessing youth psychopathology involves collecting multiple informants’ reports. Yet multi-informant reports often disagree, which necessitates integrative strategies that optimize predictive power. The trait-score approach leverages principal components analysis to account for the context and perspective from which informants provide reports. This approach may boost the predictive power of multi-informant reports and thus warrants rigorous testing. We tested the trait score approach using multi-informant reports of adolescent social anxiety in a mixed clinical and community sample of adolescents ( N = 127). The trait score incrementally predicted observed social anxiety (βs = 0.47–0.67) and referral status (odds ratios = 2.66–6.53) above and beyond individual informants’ reports and a composite of informants’ reports. The trait score predicted observed behavior at magnitudes well above those typically observed for individual informants’ reports of internalizing psychopathology (i.e., rs = .01–.15). Findings demonstrate the ability of the trait score to improve prediction of clinical indices and potentially transform widely used practices in multi-informant assessments.
Adolescents who experience social anxiety tend to hold fears about negative evaluations (e.g., taunting) and may also hold fears about positive evaluations (e.g., praise from a teacher). The Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation (BFNE) scale and Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (FPES) are 2 widely used measures of adults' evaluative concerns. Yet we know little about their psychometric properties when assessing adolescents. In a mixed clinical/community sample of 96 adolescents (66.7% female; M = 14.50 years, SD = 0.50; 63.3% African American), we examined both self-report and parent report versions of the BFNE and FPES. Adolescents and parents also provided reports about adolescents on survey measures of social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Adolescents participated in multiple social interactions in which they self-reported their state arousal before and during the tasks. Adolescent and parent BFNE and FPES reports distinguished adolescents who displayed elevated social anxiety from those who did not. Both informants' reports related to survey measures of adolescent social anxiety, when accounting for domains that commonly co-occur with social anxiety (i.e., depressive symptoms). Further, both the BFNE and FPES displayed incremental validity in relation to survey measures of adolescent social anxiety, relative to each other. However, only adolescents' BFNE and FPES reports predicted adolescents' self-reported arousal within social interactions, and only adolescents' FPES displayed incremental validity in predicting self-reported arousal, relative to their BFNE. Adolescent and parent BFNE and FPES reports display convergent validity and in some cases incremental and criterion-related validity. These findings have important implications for evidence-based assessments of adolescents' evaluative concerns.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.