The contribution of parent and youth information to identify mental health disorders or problems in adolescents

Marcel Aebi,Luise Poustka,Robert Goodman,Tobias Banaschewski,Yvonne Grimmer,Christine Kuhn,Hans-Christoph Steinhausen

doi:10.1186/s13034-017-0160-9

Abstract

BackgroundDiscrepancies between multiple informants often create considerable uncertainties in delivering services to youth. The present study assessed the ability of the parent and youth scales of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) to predict mental health problems/disorders across several mental health domains as validated against two contrasting indices of validity for psychopathology derived from the Development and Well Being Assessment (DAWBA): (1) an empirically derived computer algorithm and (2) expert based ICD-10 diagnoses.MethodsOrdinal and logistic regressions were used to predict any problems/disorders, emotional problems/disorders and behavioural problems/disorders in a community sample (n = 252) and in a clinic sample (n = 95).ResultsThe findings were strikingly similar in both samples. Parent and youth SDQ scales were related to any problem/disorder. Youth SDQ symptom and impact had the strongest association with emotional problems/disorder and parent SDQ symptom score were most strongly related to behavioural problems/disorders. Both the SDQ total and the impact scores significantly predicted emotional problems/disorders in males whereas this was the case only for the total SDQ score in females.ConclusionThe present study confirms and expands previous findings on parent and youth informant validity. Clinicians should include both parent and youth for identifying any mental health problems/disorders, youth information for detecting emotional problems/disorders, and parent information to detect behavioural problems/disorders. Not only symptom scores but also impact measures may be useful to detect emotional problems/disorders, particularly in male youth.

Highlights

Discrepancies between multiple informants often create considerable uncertainties in delivering services to youth
As expected and in contrast to the clinical sample, most adolescents from the community sample showed low probabilities for having a mental health disorder according to Development and Well Being Assess‐ ment (DAWBA) expert ratings (e.g., 3% and less, Table 1)
Some studies have previously found higher correlations between parent and youth reports for externalizing disorders [5,6,7, 19] and that self-reports can discriminate youth referred for conduct disorder from normal controls [50], our findings show limited additional value resulting from including self-reports to detect externalizing mental health problems in both the community and clinical samples

Summary

Introduction

Discrepancies between multiple informants often create considerable uncertainties in delivering services to youth. Youth and parent screening measures such as the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire [SDQ; 1, 2] or the Achenbach Systems of Empirically Based Assessments [ASEBA; 3] are easy to use and cost-effective methods to identify adolescents with psychological difficulties. Both of these instruments are highly popular among mental health practitioners and researchers and. Discrepancies between multiple informants often create considerable uncertainties in delivering services to youth and drawing conclusions from research [4]. The degree of cross-informant agreement for mental disorders varies between mental health domains, different societies and cultures and depends on the youth’s age and gender [5,6,7,8]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion