The Relations among Measurements of Informant Discrepancies within a Multisite Trial of Treatments for Childhood Social Phobia

Abstract

Discrepancies between informants' reports of children's behavior are robustly observed in clinical child research and have important implications for interpreting the outcomes of controlled treatment trials. However, little is known about the basic psychometric properties of these discrepancies. This study examined the relation between parent-child reporting discrepancies on measures of child social phobia symptoms, administered before and after treatment for social phobia. Participants included a clinic sample of 81 children (7-16 years old [M=11.75, SD=2.57]; 39 girls, 42 boys) and their parents receiving treatment as part of a multisite controlled trial. Pretreatment parent-child reporting discrepancies predicted parent-child discrepancies at posttreatment, and these relations were not better accounted for by the severity of the child's pretreatment primary diagnosis. Further, treatment responder status moderated this relation: Significant relations were identified for treatment non-responders and not for treatment responders. Overall, findings suggest that informant discrepancies can be reliably employed to measure individual differences over the course of controlled treatment trials. These data provide additional empirical support for recent work suggesting that informant discrepancies can meaningfully inform understanding of treatment response as well as variability in treatment outcomes.

Are the Clinical Characteristics of Anxious Youths Participating in Non-treatment-Related Research Comparable to those of Youths Receiving Treatment?

“…Second, we examined across the two groups the relations among GAD clinical severity, functional impairment, and GAD symptoms and worry. Consistent with prior work in anxious youth (De Los Reyes et al 2010, we hypothesized that we would observe low-to-moderate relations among GAD youths' severity of their GAD diagnoses, functional impairment, and levels of GAD symptoms and worry.…”

Socially Anxious and Peer-Victimized Preadolescents: “Doubly Primed” for Distress?

“…Given the typical mean levels and wide range of scores on the measures of social anxiety and peer victimization, however, it is possible that the recruitment method equally encouraged some parents of students with social difficulties to participate and discouraged other parents. Because parents and children may disagree about children's anxiety (De Los Reyes et al 2010), it would be informative to include both informants of social anxiety in future research. Future studies may also examine the extent to which peer victimization, specifically, or a variety of environmental stressors amplify social distress among socially anxious individuals.…”

Understanding and Using Informants’ Reporting Discrepancies of Youth Victimization: A Conceptual Model and Recommendations for Research

“…Both variable-centered and person-centered analyses have been used to evaluate the psychometric properties (e.g., test-retest reliability) of discrepancy scores, considering that parent-youth discrepancies may be most predictive of maladjustment when these discrepancies are stable over time (De Los Reyes et al 2010;De Los Reyes et al in press-a). However, it is not clear whether and how stability on discrepant reports of victimization should be examined.…”