Child, mother, and father evaluations of depression in psychiatric inpatient children

Abstract

The agreement among children and their parents in evaluating the children's depression was examined in 48 families. Newly admitted inpatient children (ages 6-13) and their mothers and fathers independently completed self-report and interview measures to assess severity and duration of the children's depression. The results indicated that different measures of depression completed by the same rater (child, mother, or father) were highly intercorrelated. Yet there was little or no relationship between child-mother and child-father ratings of the children's depression for the same or related measures of depression. Children independently diagnosed (DSM III) as depressed rated themselves and were rated by their parents as more depressed than nondepressed children. Even so, children consistently rated themselves as less depressed across the measures than did their parents. Parent ratings of the children's depression and the correspondence of child-parent ratings varied as a function of several child and family variables, including child IQ, gender, race, and family welfare status.

The use of symptom severity measured just before termination to predict child treatment dropout

“…Items are scored 0 to 2 and measure depressive symptomatology such as suicidal ideation, sadness, and sleep disturbance. The CDI is a widely used measure and has adequate test-retest reliability (r 5 .84) (Saylor, Finch, Spirito, & Bennett, 1984), internal consistency (a 5 .86) (Kovacs, 1992), and concurrent validity (Kazdin, French, & Unis, 1983;Romano & Nelson, 1988). The internal reliability for the CDI was acceptable for the current sample (Total a 5 .85).…”

Agreement between youth-reported and parent-reported psychopathology in a referred sample

“…A few studies involved clinically referred samples and invariantly document a reverse discrepancy, where youth ratings of problem severity are lower than parent ratings [27,31,37]. In clinically referred children, parents are likely to emphasize the severity of the difficulties which is often likely to result in a ceiling effect, whereas the young persons' ratings are usually correspondingly lower.…”

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

“…1 Informant discrepancies have been found in virtually every method of clinical assessment that researchers and practitioners use to assess abnormal behavior in youths (e.g., rating scales, structured interviews; Achenbach et al, 1987;Grills & Ollendick, 2002). Moreover, discrepancies have been found in samples of informants encompassing diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds (Hay et al, 1999;Jensen et al, 1999;Kaufman, Swan, & Wood, 1980;Krenke & Kollmar, 1998;Rohde et al, 1999;Rousseau & Drapeau, 1998;Verhulst, Althaus, & Berden, 1987) and in virtually any clinic sample in which discrepancies have been examined (Edelbrock, Costello, Dulcan, Conover, & Kala, 1986;Frank, Van Egeren, Fortier, & Chase, 2000;Frick, Silverthorn, & Evans, 1994;Hart, Lahey, Loeber, & Hanson, 1994;Kazdin, French, & Unis, 1983;Rapee, Barrett, Dadds, & Evans, 1994).…”