Assessing quality of life: mother-child agreement in depressed and non-depressed Hungarian.
OBJECTIVE
An important question in child psychiatry is the agreement between parents and children. We studied mother-child concordance about the quality of life of children (QoL). We hypothesized that mothers of depressed children rate lower QoL than children for themselves while mothers of non-depressed children rate better QoL; that inter-informant agreement is higher in the non-depressed sample; and finally that agreement increases with age of the child.


METHODS
QoL of depressed children (N = 248, mean age 11.45 years, SD 2.02) were compared to that of non-depressed children (N = 1695, mean age 10.34 years, SD 2.19). QoL was examined by a 7 item questionnaire (ILK).


RESULTS
Mothers of depressed children rated lower QoL than their children while mothers of nondepressed children rated higher QoL than their children. Agreement was low in both samples but higher in the controls. Inter-informant agreement was only influenced by depression.


CONCLUSIONS
Our results show that mothers relate more serious negative effects to childhood depression than their children and rate less problems for their non-depressed children compared to self-reports. Mother-child agreement is negatively influenced by depression which further stresses the importance of obtaining reports from the child and at least one parent in order to understand the subjective experiences caused by the illness.
Kiss
Eniko
E
Dept. of Child Psychiatry, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary. kiss@gyip.szote.u-szeged.hu
Kapornai
Krisztina
K
Baji
Ildikó
I
Mayer
László
L
Vetró
Agnes
A
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D002391:Catchment Area, Health; D002648:Child; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000208:ethnology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006814:Hungary / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D015588:Observer Variation; D011788:Quality of Life / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires