The Validity of the Multi-Informant Approach to Assessing Child and Adolescent Mental Health

By A. De Los Reyes, Tara M. Augenstein, Mo Wang, Sarah A. Thomas, Deborah A. G. Drabick, Darcy E Burgers, J. Rabinowitz. Psychological bulletin, 2015

1,511 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Child and adolescent patients may display mental health concerns within some contexts and not others (e.g., home vs. school). Thus, understanding the specific contexts in which patients display concerns may assist mental health professionals in tailoring treatments to patients' needs. Consequently, clinical assessments often include reports from multiple informants who vary in the contexts in which they observe patients' behavior (e.g., patients, parents, teachers). Previous meta-analyses indicate that informants' reports correlate at low-to-moderate magnitudes. However, is it valid to interpret low correspondence among reports as indicating that patients display concerns in some contexts and not others? We meta-analyzed 341 studies published between 1989 and 2014 that reported cross-informant correspondence estimates, and observed low-to-moderate correspondence (mean internalizing: r = .25; mean externalizing: r = .30; mean overall: r = .28). Informant pair, mental health domain, and measurement method moderated magnitudes of correspondence. These robust findings have informed the development of concepts for interpreting multi-informant assessments, allowing researchers to draw specific predictions about the incremental and construct validity of these assessments. In turn, we critically evaluated research on the incremental and construct validity of the multi-informant approach to clinical child and adolescent assessment. In so doing, we identify crucial gaps in knowledge for future research, and provide recommendations for “best practices” in using and interpreting multi-informant assessments in clinical work and research. This paper has important implications for developing personalized approaches to clinical assessment, with the goal of informing techniques for tailoring treatments to target the specific contexts where patients display concerns.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e3385e32737b4234e1f892f936066c4de07e6d2

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Citations in the corpus

A Meta-Analytic Review of Preschool Social and Emotional Learning Interventions (2020, background): “Reports coming from the same informants intended to measure the same skills often vary from one another (De Los Reyes et al., 2015), which adds a source of variance that makes it difficult to determine the true score for each social and emotional skill measured in this analysis.”
Evidence‐Based Assessment as an Integrative Model for Applying Psychological Science to Guide the Voyage of Treatment (2017, background): “Clinicians often consider youth report more accurate for internalizing problems, and not accurate about attention problems, for example (see De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2004, for a review).”
Constructing Validity: New Developments in Creating Objective Measuring Instruments (2019, background): “It also is important to note that self-informant correlations are typically modest (.20–.30) to moderate (.40–.60) for a wide variety of reasons (see Achenbach et al., 2005; De Los Reyes et al., 2015; and Connelly & Ones, 2010 for meta-analyses and discussions).”