Health‐related quality of life: cross‐informant agreement of father, mother, and self‐report for children and adolescents in outpatient psychotherapy treatment

BACKGROUND: To study the cross-informant agreement between father, mother harm avoidance and child rating of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in a psychiatric sample. METHODS: Data were obtained from 127 children and adolescents (aged 6-18) commencing outpatient psychotherapy treatment, mainly for anxiety, depressive, and externalising disorders. A total of 100 mothers, 69 fathers harm avoidance and 76 children (aged 11 years and older) filled out questionnaires. HRQoL was measured with the KIDSCREEN-27. RESULTS: Cross-informant agreement was moderate to high between parents and moderate to low between father-child and mother-child pairs. Both parents reported lower HRQoL than the children themselves. Standardised discrepancies correlated with gender, overall and internalising pathology, as well as harm avoidance to a small degree. CONCLUSIONS: Although there was moderate-to-high correspondence, mother and father reports were not interchangeable. When collecting a single-parent proxy rating on the child's HRQoL, researchers should be aware of the additional potential source of variance due to differing concordance of father and mother with the child's self-report especially for peer relations.