Parent-child agreement on children's behaviours reported by the Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL)

The authors examined agreement between parent and child ratings on the Child Behaviour Checklist in a sample of 1299 referred adolescents over a period of three years. Correlations ranged between 0.72 and 0.08 (mean = 0.28), while agreement using kappa was similar but slightly lower (mean = 0.24; range 0.71-0.07). Agreement on externalizing was higher than on internalizing items, and concordance increased with age for boys, while there were no differences in parent-child agreement between boys and girls. Agreement was higher for dimensions of behaviour, e.g. depression (r = 0.40).