Cross-Informant Comparison of Depressive Symptoms in Youth: A Network Approach

Developmental researchers generally use a multi-informant approach to assess youth depressive symptoms to increase diagnostic accuracy and reliability, but informant discrepancies between youth and caregivers are common. Previous studies have predominantly used the sum score-level approach to examine informant discrepancies, which may obscure the heterogeneity of depression. This study adopted a symptom-level approach, network analysis, to examine informant discrepancies regarding depressive symptoms. The participant sample comprised 1043 community youth living in China (M _age = 13.68, 48.3% male) and their caregivers. Youth and caregivers completed the Children's Depression Inventory-Youth (CDI-Y) and the Children's Depression Inventory-Parents (CDI-P) separately. We employed R 4.3.0 and the Ising model to estimate two distinct networks. We then utilized the R-package Network Comparison Test to compare these two networks. Our findings revealed that irritability emerged as a symptom with high centrality in both networks, while crying demonstrated the most significant disparity in strength centrality, being stronger in the youth-report network. Youth-reported crying showed stronger connections with suicidal ideation (edge weight = 2.78), social withdrawal (edge weight = 1.72) and schoolwork difficulty (edge weight = 1.70), whereas caregivers-reported crying was more strongly associated with self-hatred (edge weight = 1.21). This study contributes to a better understanding of the structure of depressive symptoms from the perspectives of both youth and their caregivers.