The Clinical Significance of Informant Agreement in Externalizing Behavior from Age 3 to 14

The objective of the current study was to test to what extent agreement between preschool teachers (using a questionnaire-based assessment) and clinicians (using a clinician-rated behavioral task) with regard to externalizing problems in early childhood was predictive of parent reports of children’s externalizing behavior trajectory from age 3 to age 14. The prospective longitudinal study was conducted over five waves with 111 clinically referred children aged 3–5 years in wave 1. Analyses were conducted using a multilevel modeling framework. The results of the conditional model testing the association of informant agreement with behavioral trajectories show that the greater the number of informants reporting a high level of behavioral problems in early childhood, the more the trajectory increases until adolescence. The results stress the importance of multi-informant assessment not only for methodological reasons but in order to target at-risk children.