The Needs-to-Goals Gap: How informant discrepancies in youth mental health assessments impact service delivery

The Work and Social Adjustment Scale for Youth: Psychometric properties of the teacher version and evidence of contextual variability in psychosocial impairments.

“…These recommendations run counter to formal tests of these assumptions about informant discrepancies. Specifically, prior work finds that, when examined in relation to well-established, independent validation criteria (e.g., observed behavior, clinical indicators of treatment response), informant discrepancies often reflect domain-relevant information : Data that directly pertain to the domains about which informants provide reports (for reviews, see De Los Reyes et al, 2015, 2022; De Los Reyes, Lerner, et al, 2019). In this respect, optimizing the accuracy of multi-informant assessments to predict relevant outcomes requires use of informants who systematically vary across multiple perspectives (e.g., self vs. other) and contexts of observation (e.g., home vs. school; see also Kraemer et al, 2003).…”

Consistency and source specificity of symptom ratings for Child and Adolescent Behavior Inventory Scales with mother, father, and teacher ratings of Spanish children.

“…The variability in convergent validity for teacher with mother ratings suggests stronger contextual effects for certain CABI scales than others (i.e., greater contextual effects from school to home for anxiety, LPE, and ODD, less for depression, ADHD-IN, ADHD-HI, and SCT, and little for academic impairment). Additional research with source independent and setting-specific measures with construct appropriate referents for home and school settings is required to test this hypothesis about differential contextual effects (De Los Reyes et al, 2022).…”

“…In contrast, specificity is the proportion of true score variance in scale scores unique to the nonreference method (fathers or teachers in the present study). Specificity thus quantifies source and contextual effects in ratings relative to the reference source (e.g., De Los Reyes et al, 2022).…”

Multi-Informant Assessment of Adolescents’ Social–Emotional Skills: Patterns of Agreement and Discrepancy among Teachers, Parents, and Students

“…There are certainly behaviors that can be perceived as very socially effective in the family and not so much at school, and vice versa. Furthermore, the informants may vary in their backgrounds, characteristics, and as pointed out by De Los Reyes et al [7], expertise for observing students within specific contexts. In the case of youths, observations of their own behavior pass through the contexts observed by parents and teachers, and they might also include contexts unique to themselves (e.g., peer interactions that neither parent nor teacher observes) [48].…”

“…Social skills' developmental needs may vary within and across family and school contexts, mainly because these contexts are different and include contingencies. Furthermore, paraphrasing De Los Reyes et al [7], contingencies central to addressing students' needs might manifest cross-contextually or in context-specific ways: interactions with peers at school might contain aversive or hostile factors (e.g., teasing) that students do not encounter at home. Because contingencies inform the planning of the social and emotional education that students receive, these authors point out assessments used to guide decision-making, which must leverage information sources that, collectively, harbor the ability to ably "track" subjects' needs within and across contexts.…”