Our purpose in this article was to determine the degree of consistency between different informants' reports of the behavioral/emotional problems of subjects aged from IVi to 19 years. We found 269 samples in 119 studies for meta-analyses of Pearson re between ratings by parents, teachers, mental health workers, observers, peers, and the subjects themselves. The mean rs between all types of informants were statistically significant. The mean rs were .60 between similar informants (e.g., pairs of parents), .28 between different types of informants (e.g., parent/teacher), and .22 between subjects and other informants. Correlations were significantly higher for 6-to 11-year-olds than for adolescents, and for undercontrolled versus overcomrolled problems, although these differences were not large. The modest correlations between informants indicate that child and adolescent problems are not effectively captured by present-versus-absent judgments of problems. Instead, the variations between reports by different informants argue for assessment in terms of multiple axes designed to reflect the perceived variations in child and adolescent functioning.With the publication of Personality and Assessment, Mischel (1968) revived a long-simmering debate about whether behavior is determined mainly by situational factors or by personality characteristics that remain consistent across situations. He criticized trait and psychodynamic assumptions that global personality inferences could accurately predict behavior in specific situations. The renewed debate has since grown from theoretical questions of situational specificity, to the "cognitive economics" of clinical judgment (Mischel, 1984), and then to methodological issues of whether the aggregation of observations can demonstrate consistencies in behavior (Epstein & O'Brien, 1985).None of the protagonists claim either that there are no situational influences on behavior or that there is no cross-situational consistency in behavior (Pervin, 1985). The debate is fueled, however, by a mixture of theoretical assumptions and methodological questions about how to assess and predict particular kinds of behavior.Nowhere are questions of situational specificity more crucial than in children's behavioral and emotional problems, because assessment of such problems must span diverse situations, such as the home, school, clinic, and neighborhood. (For brevity, we use "children" to include ages from 1 'h to 19 years, a range
