Are children reliable reporters?

Area of Science:

• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Developmental Psychology
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Accurate diagnostic information from children is crucial for effective psychiatric care.
• Parental reports are often used to supplement or validate child psychiatric assessments.
• Understanding the reliability of child informants is essential for clinical practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the reliability of information provided by children and their mothers during psychiatric interviews.
• To assess agreement rates between child and parent reports across different domains of psychiatric evaluation.
• To determine if informant gender influences the reliability of psychiatric data in children.

Main Methods:

• A structured psychiatric interview, mirroring standard child psychiatric evaluations, was administered to 50 children (ages 6-16) and their mothers.
• Interviewer-rated mental status assessments were conducted for each child.
• Agreement between child and mother responses was calculated across all questions and specific sections.

Main Results:

• An average agreement of 80% was found between children's and mothers' responses.
• The highest agreement (84%) was observed for factual information.
• The lowest agreement (69%) was noted in the mental status section, with girls providing more consistent information than boys.

Conclusions:

• Child and mother reports demonstrate substantial agreement in psychiatric evaluations, particularly for factual data.
• Discrepancies in mental status reporting highlight the complexity of subjective symptom assessment in pediatric populations.
• Gender differences in informant reliability suggest that girls may offer more consistent accounts in child psychiatric assessments.