Degree Date
1-2016
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
Abstract
The current study examined parent-adolescent cross-informant agreement in two clinical samples (Total N = 204 dyads) based on adolescents’ ratings on the Youth Self-Report and parents’ ratings on the Child Behavior Checklist. Using the five different methods for examining cross-informant agreement used by Rescorla et al. (2013) in large international population samples, we sought to examine whether parents report more problems about their adolescents than the adolescents report about themselves, the degree of correlation between parent and adolescent scores on problem scales, how much parents overall and their children overall tend to agree on item ratings, how well parent-adolescent dyads agree on which specific items are rated low, medium, or high, and how well parents and their adolescents agree about the adolescent having a high number of problems. We found that adolescents and their parents did not tend to differ in levels of problem reporting and that agreement between the dyads tended to be moderate. We also found high levels of overall agreement around the most and least common items, although dyads did not tend to agree about the specific items endorsed by the parent and adolescent. Finally, we found parents tended to agree when their children expressed elevated range scores, and adolescents tended to agree when their parents indicated non-elevated range scores. However, when parents endorsed elevated range scores, their adolescents were less likely to agree. Parent agreement varied between the samples around the adolescent’s assessment of a non-elevated-range score. Relevance to clinical practice and understanding of parent-child discrepancies in clinical populations are discussed.
Citation
Neill, Jillian L. "Parent-Adolescent Cross-Informant Agreement: Findings from Two Clinical Samples." PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2016.