Abstract
The majority of studies on parent-child discrepancies in the assessment of adolescent emotional and behavioral problems have been conducted in Western countries. It is believed that parent-adolescent agreement would be higher in societies with a strong culture of familism. We examined whether parent-adolescent discrepancies in the rating of adolescent emotional and behavioral problems are related to parental and family factors in Taiwan. Participants included 1,421 child-parent pairs of 7th-grade students from 12 middle schools in Northern Taiwan and their parents. We calculated Pearson’s correlation coefficients to assess the relationship between parental (Child Behavior Checklist, CBCL) and adolescent (Youth Self Report, YSR) report of emotional/behavioral problem syndromes. Regression models were used to assess parent-adolescent differences in relation to parental psychopathology and family factors. We found that parent-adolescent agreement was moderate (r = 0.37). Adolescents reported higher symptom scores than their parents (Mean Total Problem Score: CBCL: 20.79, YSR: 33.14). Parental psychopathology was related to higher parental ratings and better informant agreement. Parents with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tended to report lower scores for adolescent problem syndromes, resulting in higher levels of disagreement. Greater maternal care was related to higher parent-adolescent agreement. Based on our study findings, we conclude that familism values do not seem to improve parent-child agreement in the assessment of adolescent problem syndromes. The finding that higher SES was related to increased discrepancies speaks to the need to explore the culture-specific mechanisms giving rise to informant discrepancies.
Highlights
Disagreement between self and parental report of adolescent psychopathology is common [1,2,3,4]
S1 Table presents items of the Chinese version CBCL and YSR used in the current analysis with the corresponding items in English
The average emotional and behavioral problem syndrome scores reported by adolescents were higher than parental reports (Mean Total Problem Score: CBCL: 20.79, YSR: 33.14) (Table 1)
Summary
Disagreement between self and parental report of adolescent psychopathology is common [1,2,3,4]. A recent meta-analysis of 341 studies conducted between 1989 and 2014 revealed a low-tomoderate correspondence between informant reporting of children’s mental health concerns [5] These discrepancies pose major challenges for clinical practice, research, and theory related to child psychiatry and psychology. The most commonly proposed factor contributing to the observed parent-child discrepancy is the type of disorder being observed; there are indications that agreement between child and parental reporting is stronger with respect to externalizing than internalizing symptoms [5,6,7] Externalizing behaviors, such as aggression and hyperactivity, are more likely to be observed directly, whereas internalizing symptoms, such as anxiety and depression, are less observable in nature. The proposition that externalizing symptoms yield greater agreement has been supported by several previous investigations [8,9,10,11], one recent systematic comparison of 25 societies by Rescorla et al did not find differences in the level of parent-child agreement for internalizing and externalizing symptoms [12]
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