Cross-Informant Agreement Between Parent-Reported and Adolescent Self-Reported Problems in 25 Societies

Abstract

We used population sample data from 25 societies to answer the following questions: (a) How consistently across societies do adolescents report more problems than their parents report about them? (b) Do levels of parent-adolescent agreement vary among societies for different kinds of problems? (c) How well do parents and adolescents in different societies agree on problem item ratings? (d) How much do parent-adolescent dyads within each society vary in agreement on item ratings? (e) How well do parent-adolescent dyads within each society agree on the adolescent's deviance status? We used five methods to test cross-informant agreement for ratings obtained from 27,861 adolescents ages 11 to 18 and their parents. Youth Self-Report (YSR) mean scores were significantly higher than Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) mean scores for all problem scales in almost all societies, but the magnitude of the YSR-CBCL discrepancy varied across societies. Cross-informant correlations for problem scale scores varied more across societies than across types of problems. Across societies, parents and adolescents tended to rate the same items as low, medium, or high, but within-dyad parent-adolescent item agreement varied widely in every society. In all societies, both parental noncorroboration of self-reported deviance and adolescent noncorroboration of parent-reported deviance were common. Results indicated many multicultural consistencies but also some important differences in parent-adolescent cross-informant agreement. Our findings provide valuable normative baselines against which to compare multicultural findings for clinical samples.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parent–Adolescent Discrepancies: Existing Findings and Future Directions

“…Results reported by Rescorla et al (2013) indicated considerable cross-cultural consistency but also some important societal differences in parent-adolescent crossinformant agreement. Adolescents reported significantly more problems than their parents in 24 of the 25 societies, and the analysis of variance on Total Problems score yielded an informant effect size (ES) of 22 %.…”

“…Despite the fact that many previous single-society population sample studies had documented modest parentadolescent agreement on behavioral/emotional problems using various statistical methods, Rescorla et al (2013) argued that systematic comparisons of parent-adolescent agreement across many different societies using the same analytic methods were needed. Accordingly, Rescorla et al (2013) compared CBCL and YSR scores for 27,861 parent-adolescent dyads from 25 different societies, thereby providing the most comprehensive study to date of crosscultural findings on parent-adolescent agreement for population samples.…”

“…Accordingly, Rescorla et al (2013) compared CBCL and YSR scores for 27,861 parent-adolescent dyads from 25 different societies, thereby providing the most comprehensive study to date of crosscultural findings on parent-adolescent agreement for population samples. Because the 25 societies differed in many ways (e.g., race/ethnicity, religion, cultural values, political/economic systems, and geographic regions), Rescorla et al hypothesized that parent-adolescent agreement would also vary across these societies.…”

Is there a common pathway to maladjustment for internationally adopted and non-adopted adolescents?

“…In order to control for the shared-method variance bias, to reduce the measurement error (Cole & Maxwell, 2003) and to limit the number of variables in the present study with its modest sample size, we used a cross-rater strategy by averaging the adolescent's and the parents' EB, r(72) = .59, p b .001, and IB scores, r(72) = .41, p b .001, although the inter-rater correlations were only moderate. Note that these moderate correlations were in the same range or even higher than in previous cross-informant studies, where the parent-youth agreement was .25 on average (Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987) and more recently .44 for EB and .41 for IB (Rescorla et al, 2013). Risk factor measures IQ An evaluation of IQ was carried out using four subtests of the WISC-IV (Wechsler, 2005): Similarities, Matrix Reasoning, Letter-Number Sequencing and the Symbol Search.…”

Evidence-based psychotherapy in children and adolescents: advances, methodological and conceptual limitations, and perspectives

“…Therefore, one measure or informant is not able to capture all of these aspects of treatment efficacy. Another limitation of current outcome assessment in child and adolescent psychotherapy research is the reliance on few and often non-blinded informants with low inter-informant agreement across settings, for example, teachers and parents [14,16,17]. This may lead to biased or inconsistent information about treatment effects.…”