Examined whether mother-child discrepancies in perceived child behavior problems relate to dysfunctional interactions between mother and child and stress in the mother. Participants included 239 children (6-16 years old; 58 girls, 181 boys) referred for oppositional, aggressive, and antisocial behavior, and their mothers. Mother-child discrepancies in perceived child behavior problems were related to mother-child conflict. Moreover, maternal stress mediated this relationship. The findings suggest that discrepancies among mother and child evaluations of child functioning are not merely reflections of different perspectives or artifacts of the assessment process, but can form components of conceptual models that can be developed and tested to examine the interrelations among critical domains of child, parent, and family functioning.
Keywordsattribution bias context; disagreement; discrepancies; stress; conflict Parents, teachers, children, and clinicians are often discrepant in how they perceive and rate the child's social, emotional, and behavioral problems (e.g., Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987;De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005;Grills & Ollendick, 2002). Discrepancies among informants' ratings, especially those between mothers and children, have been studied extensively to examine correlates of the discrepancies, whether discrepancies are more likely with some disorders rather than others, and whether data from some informants (e.g., mother vs. child) are more useful for some disorders or purposes than others (see De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005, for a review).Discrepancies among informants' ratings are often considered as both a clinical reality and methodological nuisance. The clinical reality refers to the fact that informants' perceptions of children's functioning are more often than not disparate from one another, and their ratings simply will differ, even when the same measure (e.g., identical rating scale) is used. The methodological nuisance refers to the fact that clinicians and researchers can obtain quite different results in either a clinical evaluation or research, based on whose views (mother's, child's, teacher's) are assessed, or whether one or all are used to characterize the child. For example, in a given sample, different children will be identified as meeting criteria for a disorder, depending on whose ratings are used or whether informants' ratings are combined (e.g., Kazdin, 1989;Offord et al., 1996; Youngstrom, Findling, & Calabrese, 3 Correspondence regarding this manuscript should be addressed to Alan E. Kazdin, Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, 230 S. Frontage Road, New Haven, CT 06520-7900, alan.kazdin@yale.edu. Note: This paper was forwarded on August 29, 2005, and is not the final version of this article.
NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Child Fam Stud. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 January 13. . Similarly, the extent to which individuals improve with treatment and whether one treatment is more effective than another can vary as a function ...