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.