Multi-Informant Assessments of Adolescent Social Anxiety: Adding Clarity by Leveraging Reports from Unfamiliar Peer Confederates

doi:10.1016/j.beth.2017.05.001

Behavior Therapy

Volume 49, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 84-98

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2017.05.001 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Adolescent social anxiety assessments often include adolescent and parent reports
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Low adolescent-parent correspondence makes clinical decision-making difficult
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Assessments would benefit from informants who observe adolescents specifically within interactions with unfamiliar peers
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We tested the incremental value of reports from unfamiliar peer confederates
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Findings have broad implications for increasing interpretability of adolescent social anxiety assessments

Abstract

Adolescent social anxiety (SA) assessments often include adolescent and parent reports, and low reporting correspondence results in uncertainties in clinical decision-making. Adolescents display SA within non-home contexts such as peer interactions. Yet, current methods for collecting peer reports raise confidentiality concerns, though adolescent SA assessments nonetheless would benefit from context-specific reports relevant to adolescent SA (i.e., interactions with unfamiliar peers). In a sample of 89 adolescents (30 Evaluation-Seeking; 59 Community Control), we collected SA reports from adolescents and their parents, and SA reports from unfamiliar peer confederates who interacted with adolescents during 20-minute mock social interactions. Adolescents and parents completed reports on trait measures of adolescent SA and related concerns (e.g., depressive symptoms), and adolescents completed self-reports of state arousal within mock social interactions. Adolescents’ SA reports correlated with reports on parallel measures from parents in the .30s and with peer confederates in the .40s to .50s, whereas reports from parent-confederate dyads correlated in the .07 to .22 range. Adolescent, parent, and peer confederate SA reports related to reports on trait measures of adolescent SA and depressive symptoms, and distinguished Evaluation-Seeking from Community Control Adolescents. Confederates’ SA reports incrementally predicted adolescents’ self-reported SA over and above parent reports, and vice versa, with combined Rs ranging from .51 to .60. These combined Rs approximate typical correspondence levels between informants who observe adolescents in the same context (e.g., mother-father). Adolescent and peer confederate (but not parent) SA reports predicted adolescents’ state arousal in social interactions. These findings have implications for clarifying patterns of reporting correspondence in clinical assessments of adolescent SA.

Section snippets

Purpose and hypotheses

The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on multi-informant approaches to assessing adolescent SA. We tested five hypotheses among a mixed clinical/community sample of adolescents, their parents, and peer confederates who interacted with adolescents during a 20-minute mock social interaction period. First, we expected to observe levels of correspondence among adolescent, parent, and peer confederate SA reports that were consistent with prior work (i.e., rs in the .20s to .40s;

participants

Participants included 89 adolescent-parent dyads who completed the measures described below as part of a larger study conducted at a large mid-Atlantic university. Parents contacted the laboratory in response to one of two different advertisements. These advertisements offered either a no-cost clinical assessment to adolescents for whom their parent expressed interest on their behalf for a clinical SA screening evaluation (i.e., Evaluation-Seeking Adolescents), or participation in a study

preliminary analyses

We conducted preliminary analyses to test if our data met assumptions for planned parametric analyses (i.e., skewness/kurtosis in range of + 2.0). Frequency distributions for all variables used in analyses reported below were examined to assess normality. Scores for all measures with the exception of BDI-II reports fell within acceptable ranges of skewness and kurtosis. Specifically, adolescent self-reports and parent reports about adolescents on the BDI-II exhibited relatively high positive

main findings

The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on multi-informant approaches to assessing adolescent SA. We discovered five findings. First, we observed varying levels of correspondence among adolescent, parent, and peer confederate reports. Adolescent reports correlated with parent reports in the .30s and correlated in the .40s to .50s with peer confederate reports. Parent and peer confederate reports correlated in the .07 to .22 range. We observed significantly larger magnitudes of

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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View full text

Multi-Informant Assessments of Adolescent Social Anxiety: Adding Clarity by Leveraging Reports from Unfamiliar Peer Confederates

Highlights

Abstract

Section snippets

Purpose and hypotheses

participants

preliminary analyses

main findings

Conflict of Interest Statement

Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Chest

Child/adolescent behavioral and emotional problems: Implications of cross-informant correlations for situational specificity

Psychological Bulletin

Social anxiety in adolescents and young adults: Translating developmental science into practice

Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis

Psychological Bulletin

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders

When to use the Bonferroni correction

Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics

Stability of anxious symptomatology in children

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

Behavioral treatment of childhood social phobia

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

Peer victimization among schoolchildren: Correlations, causes, consequences, and considerations in assessment and intervention

School Psychology Quarterly

Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences

A procedure for the assessment of social skills: the Simulated Social Interaction Test

Introduction to the special issue: Toward implementing physiological measures in clinical child and adolescent assessments

Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

Implementing psychophysiology in clinical assessments of adolescent social anxiety: Use of rater judgments based on graphical representations of psychophysiology

Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

The validity of the multi-informant approach to assessing child and adolescent mental health

Psychological Bulletin

Graphical representations of adolescents’ psychophysiological reactivity to social stressor tasks: Reliability and validity of the Chernoff Face approach and person-centered profiles for clinical use

Psychological Assessment

Adolescent self-reports of social anxiety: Can they disagree with objective psychophysiological measures and still be valid?

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment

The relations among measurements of informant discrepancies within a multisite trial of treatments for childhood social phobia

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

Are clinicians’ assessments of improvements in children’s functioning “global”?

Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

Informant discrepancies in adult social anxiety disorder assessments: Links with contextual variations in observed behavior

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Principles underlying the use of multiple informants’ reports

Annual Review of Clinical Psychology

Linking informant discrepancies to observed variations in young children’s disruptive behavior

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

Measuring informant discrepancies in clinical child research

Psychological Assessment