JCCAP Update: Special Issue on Informant Discrepancies in Youth Mental Health Assessments

JCCAP Update: Special Issue on Informant Discrepancies in Youth Mental Health Assessments

By Andres De Los Reyes, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, JCCAP

By Andres De Los Reyes, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, JCCAP

Validly characterizing youth mental health phenomena requires evidence-based approaches to assessment. An evidence-based assessment cannot rely on a “gold standard” instrument but rather, batteries of instruments. These batteries include multiple modalities of instrumentation (e.g., surveys, interviews, performance-based tasks, physiological readings, structured clinical observations). Among these instruments are those that require soliciting reports from multiple informants: People who provide psychometrically sound data about youth mental health (e.g., parents, teachers, youth themselves). The January 2011 issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (JCCAP) included a Special Section devoted to the most common outcome of multi-informant assessments of youth mental health, namely discrepancies across informants’ reports (i.e., informant discrepancies). This special section revolved around a critical question: Might informant discrepancies contain data relevant to understanding youth mental health (i.e., domain-relevant information)?

In the first issue of the 2023 volume of JCCAP, Dr. Catherine Epkins and I served as Editors of a Special Issue on informant discrepancies in youth mental health assessments. This Special Issue is a “sequel” to the 2011 Special Section. Since 2011, an accumulating body of work indicates that informant discrepancies often contain domain-relevant information. Ultimately, we designed this Special Issue to lay the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations of guidelines for integrating multi-informant data when informant discrepancies contain domain-relevant information.

JCCAP’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, agreed to make all 9 articles in the Special Issue free to access until the end of 2023! Find all 9 articles here.

The Special Issue includes:

• A new measurement validation paradigm designed to address problems with using the multitrait-multimethod matrix when assessing youth
• Two authoritative reviews on multi-informant approaches to assessing therapeutic processes, namely the therapeutic alliance and treatment fidelity
• Papers that represent the latest work on informant discrepancies when planning treatment, assessing autism spectrum concerns, and assessing limited prosocial emotions
• A Future Directions piece focused on “next steps” in research on discrepant reports when assessing suicide risk
• An editorial statement co-authored by 70 scholars in youth mental health that discusses the special issue in the context of the 60-year history of research and theory on informant discrepancies in youth mental health assessments

I hope you find the work exciting and inspiring. Please feel free to forward this to anyone in your respective networks who you think might be interested in this work!