Discrepancies between adolescent, mother, and father reports of adolescent internalizing symptom levels and their association with parent symptoms

Abstract

Discrepancies among informants on measures of internalizing symptoms in children and adolescents are common in the literature. One reason proposed for such discrepancies is that psychopathology may distort or bias third-party reports. In the present study, measures of adolescent internalizing symptom levels were completed by adolescents aged 13 to 18 years and their mothers and fathers. Parents also completed measures of their own depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. Parent symptoms explained a small amount of variance in discrepancies between informants. Specifically, mothers' depression and stress symptoms were associated with discrepancies regarding sons' symptomatology and fathers' anxiety and stress symptoms were associated with discrepancies regarding daughters' symptomatology. Implications of informant discrepancies for both clinical practice and research are discussed.

Testing parent dyad interchangeability in the parent proxy-report of PedsQL™ 4.0: a differential item functioning analysis

“…First, we do not know how far item endorsements across fathers and mothers are linked to the child's gender. Regarding the results of some behavioural studies, it could be hypothesized that mother/daughter and father/son dyads might be interesting subgroups for an analysis of their influence on the interchangeability of parent proxy-reports about children's HRQoL [44,45]. Second, in the present study, the majority of participants were parents of apparently healthy school children; if children had a serious chronic illness, agreement might be affected.…”

Agreement in Youth–Parent Perceptions of Parenting Behaviors: A Case for Testing Measurement Invariance in Reporter Discrepancy Research

“…Recognition of the magnitude of parental influence on child development has resulted in numerous attempts to quantitatively assess parenting (Robinson et al 2011;Shelton et al 1996;Strayhorn and Weidman 1988). Generally, the use of multi-informant data collection is considered best practice as it provides information from multiple perspectives across different situations (Hughes and Gullone 2010;Richters 1992;Silverman and Saavedra 2004). Moreover, a vast body of research across constructs such as anxiety , interparental conflict (Davies et al 2012), and conduct problems (Frick et al 2003) has shown that collecting both the parent and child's report of parenting behaviors provides more insight into family and individual functioning than either report alone (see De Los Reyes et al 2013b).…”

The Social Ecology of Adolescents’ Cancer Experience: A Narrative Review and Future Directions

“…Also, male adolescent cancer patients may be more conflictual or emotionally-distant than female adolescent cancer patients (Seiffge-Krenke 1999), which may impact their relationships with their caregiver and healthcare providers. Moreover, the gender match or mismatch of adolescents and their caregivers has been shown to be important for their relationship (e.g., Hughes and Gullone 2010;Roddenberry and Renk 2008). For instance, male adolescent patients may have more conflict with maternal caregivers than paternal caregivers and therefore may be less resistant to reminders about illness management (e.g., medication adherence) from fathers.…”