The Child Assessment Schedule: parent-child agreement and validity measures

Parents' and children's reports of behavioural-emotional problems in 116 children assessed by the Child Assessment Schedule developed by Hodges et al. (Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 21, 468-473, 1982) and the Graham & Rutter Parent Interview (British Journal of Psychiatry, 114, 581-592, 1968), both semi-structured interviews, revealed relatively high agreement compared with studies using highly structured assessment procedures. The majority of disagreements could be attributed to higher parents' scores. Only fears were reported more often by children, especially by the better-functioning children, suggesting that children's reports of fears may be related to a higher level of adaptive functioning rather than a higher level of psychopathology. Although the child interview may be crucial to obtain information often not reported by parents such as fears and anxiety, it was found that information from the child contributed only little to overall clinical judgement based on information already available from the parents.