title: Parent-child agreement in prepubertal depression: findings with a modified assessment method.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Lack of or low parent-child (P-C) agreement is a well-documented problem in child psychopathology assessment. This study proposed to improve this agreement by using a modified assessment approach.
  
  
  METHODS
  Ninety-three depressed prepubertal children, aged 6 to 12 years, and their mothers underwent an assessment procedure that combined multiple assessment measures given separately to child and mother (Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present Episode [K-SADS-P], Children's Depression Inventory, and traditional psychiatric interviews), confrontation of either and/or both informants with intra- and interinformant discrepancies, and senior clinician's "best estimate" clinical judgment to solve discrepant ratings. Correlational statistics (r, kappa, and z) were used to compare child's with mother's ratings on 20 K-SADS-P depressive symptoms.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The major hypothesis, that using our assessment procedure, P-C agreement would be significant and moderately high (r and kappa = .40 or higher), was confirmed. The second hypothesis on dissociation of P-C agreement on behavioral versus ideational symptoms was partially confirmed; the third hypothesis on adverse effects of maternal "depression" on P-C agreement was not confirmed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our assessment method has potential clinical application in enhancing diagnostic reliability of childhood depression assessment.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), College of Medicine, Oklahoma City.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Whittlesey
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Scimeca
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: DiGiacomo
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bui
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Parsons
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Scarborough
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Paddock
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D016241:Child of Impaired Parents; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D015588:Observer Variation; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales