Whose depression relates to discrepancies? Testing relations between informant characteristics and informant discrepancies from both informants' perspectives.

Abstract

This study examined whether mothers' and children's depressive symptoms were each uniquely related to mother-child rating discrepancies on a multidimensional dyadic construct: domains associated with parental monitoring (i.e., Child Disclosure, Parental Knowledge, and Parental Solicitation). Participants included a community sample of 335 mother/female-caregiver and child dyads (182 girls, 153 boys; 9−16 years old). Children's depressive symptoms were consistently related to each of the three domains of mother-child discrepancies. Mothers' depressive symptoms were related to perceived discrepancies in two domains (Child Disclosure and Parental Knowledge). Furthermore, these relations could not be accounted for by other informant characteristics (maternal stress, child age, child gender, child ethnicity). Findings provide important empirical support for theory suggesting that both informants' perspectives meaningfully contribute to their discrepancies in perceived behavior. Consideration of both informants' perspectives leads to valuable information as to whether any particular characteristic is an important correlate of discrepancies. Keywords attribution bias context; correspondence; depression-distortion; disagreement; informant discrepanciesIn the clinical sciences, the absence of definitive measures of constructs makes it critical to gather information on a participant's psychosocial dysfunction from the perspectives of multiple informants (e.g., self, significant other, clinician, laboratory observer, biological indices). However, one of the most consistent yet poorly understood phenomena is that multiple informants provide inconsistent ratings of the same participant's psychosocial dysfunction (e.g., Achenbach, 2006;De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005). Discrepancies are critical for numerous reasons. First, they are present across measurement methods (De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005) and areas of psychological science (e.g., Barrett, 2006;Clancy, McGrath, & Oddson, 2005;Kenny, Albright, Malloy, & Kashy, 1994;Saudino, Wertz, Gagne, & Chawla, 2004). Second, discrepancies pose significant interpretive problems for researchers studying NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript the prevalence of dysfunction, risk factors, types of dysfunction to target for intervention, and the identification of evidence-based interventions (De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005, 2008. Third, discrepant perceptions between informants are related to how they interact with one another and may predict and/or negatively affect psychosocial and physiological functioning (e.g., Beck, Hartos, & Simons-Morton, 2006;Ferdinand, van der Ende, & Verhulst, 2004;Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2005). Thus, the implications of discrepancies highlight the importance of understanding why they exist.Research on mechanisms accounting for discrepancies currently is at a preliminary stage (De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005). In fact, the clinical discrepancies literature has paid most attention to examining the relation between discrepancies a...

Congruence and Incongruence in Adolescents’ and Parents’ Perceptions of the Family: Using Response Surface Analysis to Examine Links with Adolescents’ Psychological Adjustment

“…In particular, incongruence defined by adolescents holding more negative perceptions of the family environment than parents was associated with higher levels of adolescent depressive symptoms and perceived stress. Similar results have also been obtained using directional difference scores (De Los Reyes et al 2008Guion et al 2009;Ferdinand et al 2004). The current study, as well as work using polynomial regression (Laird and De Los Reyes 2013), suggests that these associations may not entirely be a function of methodological artifacts.…”

“…As such, the direction of adolescent-parent discrepancies, not just the overall amount, may matter in the context of adolescent adjustment. This argument is supported by research demonstrating that more negativity in adolescents' versus parents' perceptions of parental monitoring is associated with greater adolescent depressive symptoms (De Los Reyes et al 2008) and rule-breaking behavior (De Los Reyes et al 2010). Similarly, more negativity in adolescents' versus parents' perceptions of parenting behavior is associated with greater adolescent internalizing problems and less social competence (Guion et al 2009).…”

Parents' Power Assertive Discipline and Internalizing Problems in Adolescents: The Role of Attachment

“…Recent research has demonstrated that the informant discrepancy is also due to both informants' depression (De Los Reyes, Goodman, Kliewer, & Reid-Quiñones, 2008). The current study follows the recognition that internalizing problems are preferably measured by the adolescents' perspective alone.…”

Two Sides of a Story: Mothers’ and Adolescents’ Agreement on Child Disclosure in Immigrant and Native Families

“…In Kerr and Stattin's (2000) study, there was only about 20% shared variance between adolescents' and parents' reports of children's disclosure (r=.45). In other studies, the correlation was even lower: r=.23 or 5% shared variance (De Los Reyes et al 2008) and r=.21 or 4% shared variance (Laird et al 2010). A potential explanation for the difference between children's disclosure reported by mothers and adolescents is related to the nature of the samples.…”

“…To fill this gap, our study focused on immigrants' and natives' mother-adolescent agreement on children's disclosures. Children's disclosures can be seen as the result of mutual communication processes between parents and children that are driven by both these sources (De Los Reyes et al 2008;Kerr and Stattin 2000).This understanding goes beyond existing research with immigrants, which often assumes that mother-child agreement is the result of transmission from parents to children (e.g., Schönpflug 2009). The premise behind this study was that, if the adaptation of adolescent immigrants to a new cultural setting does indeed undermine parent-child relationships, we should see lower mother-adolescent Mother-Adolescent Agreement 16 agreement on children's disclosure compared to that found among natives, an indication that parent-child communication in immigrant families is to some extent less optimal compared to that in families without acculturation-related challenges.…”