Is Parent-Child Disagreement on Child Anxiety Explained by Differences in Measurement Properties? An Examination of Measurement Invariance Across Informants and Time.

Thomas M. Olino,Megan Finsaas,Lea R. Dougherty,Daniel N. Klein

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01295

Abstract

There are numerous empirical studies demonstrating that agreement between parent-reports of youth and youth self-reports of internalizing behavior problems is modest at best. This has spurred much research on factors that influence the magnitude of associations between informants, including individual difference characteristics of the informants and contexts through which individuals interact with the child. There is also tremendous interest in understanding symptom trajectories longitudinally. However, each of these lines of work are predicated on the assumptions that the psychometric construct that is being assessed from each informant and at each measurement occasion is the same. This study examined measurement invariance between maternal and child reports and longitudinally across ages 9 and 12 on five dimensions of anxiety using the Screen for Child Anxiety and Related Disorders (SCARED; Birmaher et al., 1999). No cross-informant models for anxiety dimensions achieved acceptable fit and at least partial metric and scalar invariance. Moreover, few longitudinal models demonstrated acceptable fit and at least partial metric and scalar invariance. Thus, using the SCARED as an example, these results show that inter-informant agreement may be compromised by different item functioning, and highlight the need for testing invariance before using measures for longitudinal tracking of symptoms.

Highlights

There has been extensive research on agreement and disagreement between raters of symptoms of behavior problems in children and adolescents
After imposing constraints on the item thresholds across time to test for scalar invariance, overall model fit was excellent and the model did not demonstrate a substantial reduction in fit relative to the partial metric invariant model, supporting scalar invariance
We used the subscales from the Screen for Child Anxiety and Related Disorders (SCARED) to examine overall fit of each anxiety construct in each informant and at each assessment

Summary

INTRODUCTION

There has been extensive research on agreement and disagreement between raters of symptoms of behavior problems in children and adolescents. Numerous studies have examined factors that explain the modest levels of convergence between informants on youth internalizing and externalizing behavior problems These studies have considered moderating factors such as parent–child relationship functioning (Treutler and Epkins, 2003), parent symptoms (Youngstrom et al, 2000; Treutler and Epkins, 2003; Rothen et al, 2009), parental stress (Youngstrom et al, 2000; Langberg et al, 2010), child race (Youngstrom et al, 2000), child sex (Rothen et al, 2009), and characteristics of the symptoms themselves (e.g., observability, salience; Frank et al, 2000; Karver, 2006). In instances when full MI fails, we examine partial MI that permits some flexibility in the models

Participants and Procedure

RESULTS

DISCUSSION