A New Approach to Integrating Data From Multiple Informants in Psychiatric Assessment and Research: Mixing and Matching Contexts and Perspectives

Abstract

In obtaining a consensus measure, the issue is not determining how many informants are needed but choosing the right set of informants.

Informant Discrepancies in the Assessment of Childhood Psychopathology: A Critical Review, Theoretical Framework, and Recommendations for Further Study.

“…As such, informants are posited to provide discrepant ratings because they base their ratings on observations of the child's behavior in different situations. In addition, more recent conceptualizations of why informants' ratings are discrepant also take into account differences in the perspectives that informants have when rating the child's problem behavior (e.g., observer vs. self; Kraemer et al, 2003).…”

“…Indeed, attributing informant discrepancies simply to differences in the contexts and/or perspectives by which informants perceive the child's behavior assumes that informant discrepancies are simply a reality of clinical assessment and are due to factors that cannot be controlled by the investigator or clinician gathering information from different informants. As a result, such conceptualizations limit the development of approaches to managing informant discrepancies to those that deal with integrating information from informants after the data are already collected (see Kraemer et al, 2003).Second, conceptualizations that focus on emotions and/or negative affect as mechanisms by which informant discrepancies exist (see Youngstrom et al, 1999), in addition to their silence on the role of the context of assessment, focus on how such characteristics bias a particular informants' ratings (i.e., parents, specifically mothers) and, inherently, cannot explain discrepancies across all pairs of informants (e.g., parent-child, teacher-child, motherfather, teacher-parent). Moreover, given the literature reviewed previously that suggests that informant discrepancies may be influenced by a number of informant characteristics, conceptualizations of informant discrepancies that focus on one particular informant characteristic exclusive to one particular informant may be limited in their use in conceptualizing why informant discrepancies exist across informant pairs.…”

Social, Emotional, and Academic Competence Among Children Who Have Had Contact With Child Protective Services: Prevalence and Stability Estimates

“…These criteria are consistent with those employed by Kaufman et al (1994). Ideally, we would have measured resilience by combining data from informants such that error associated with informant bias and measurement context would have been minimized (Kraemer et al, 2003). However, the structure of the NSCAW data did not facilitate this approach.…”

“…New methods are available that facilitate valid measures of child characteristics (Kraemer et al, 2003), but these approaches require careful sampling of informants and contexts that were not available in the NSCAW data. Thus, our measures of resilience reflect the aggregation of informant reports of children's functioning rather than error-free measures of children's characteristics.…”

Agreement between self-report and medical records on signs and symptoms of respiratory illness

“…44 The difference between directly experiencing a symptom and externally observing something indicative of a symptom should lead to different evaluations. The situational or contextual basis of the judgement also differs, 45 suggesting that both perspectives are important.…”