Major and Classification
Psychology
Faculty Mentors
- Professor Larua Baker
Department
- Psychology
McNair Project
“Discrepancy in Agreement: Step to Understanding Informant Reliability”
The purpose of the project is to understand how rater characteristics influence agreement between caregiver-child pairs when evaluating childhood aggression on the Child Aggression Questionnaire (CAQ) in an on going twin study. The Southern California Twin Project uses a multi-informant approach in assessments of aggression. The participating pre-adolescent twins are 9-10 years old. Factors like depression, anxiety, SES, age and gender are reviewed in this project, in addition to new characteristics like IQ, attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), and aggression and their effects on agreement are evaluated for the first time. This agreement between pairs was measured through mean difference tests, Pearson correlations across shared items, and included a newly developed measure of agreement calculated by the mean of all individual caregiver-child pair correlations. The results indicated that caregivers rated their children higher on CAQ aggression than the children rated themselves, both for boys and girls. There were also sex-differences in average CAQ ratings with boys being rated as more aggressive than girls, both for caregiver reports and child self-reports. Children with higher performance and full IQ’s have significantly more agreement than children with lower IQ’s.