Mental Health Cross-Informant Agreement for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Adolescents

ObjectivesCross-informant agreement between parent-youth dyads has been the focus of extensive research, but youth from diverse cultures have received less attention. Cross-information agreement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous parent-youth dyads were compared.MethodA total of 152 parent-youth dyads, consisting of 29.6% Indigenous and 70.4% non-Indigenous, were contrasted on level of agreement using the Child Behavior Checklist and Youth Self-Report forms of the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment.ResultsThe overall level of agreement for the full sample (r=.41) was comparable to the extent literature. As predicted, externalizing difficulties were rated with significantly higher levels of agreement than internalizing difficulties (externalizing r=.51; internalizing r=.32). While age did not significantly moderate the levels of agreement, gender did show an effect with female youth reporting higher levels of problems than males. The most notable finding was the cultural effect on levels of agreement. The rate of cross-informant agreement for the Indigenous parent-youth dyads was significantly higher than the low to moderate agreement found for non-Indigenous pairs. Moreover, the level of cross-informant agreement between the externalizing and internalizing problem scales was similar for the Indigenous dyads (r=.59; r=.62, respectively), but was significantly different for the non-Indigenous dyads (r=.50; r=.19, respectively).ConclusionsThis study highlights possible cultural differences in cross-informant agreement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth and their parents