Adolescent social and cognitive competence: Cross-informant and intra-individual consistency across three years

Abstract

Addressed the questions of cross-informant consistency at one point in time and within-person consistency across time for ratings of adolescent cognitive and social competence. Hurter's Perceived Competence Scale for children (1982) was administered to 98 triads of adolescents, their mothers, and their teachers over a 3-year period. Results indicate that, although mean level of perceived competence varied among the different raters, with adolescents scoring themselves lower than both mothers and teachers, all correlations among the various informants at each point in time were significant. Similarly, within-person correlations across years, including a 2-year interval, were significant, indicating that perceptions of cognitive and social competence are relatively stable over a 3-year period, even when adolescents served as informants.