Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESMothers' Mental Illness and Child Behavior Problems: Cause-Effect Association or Observation Bias?
Section snippets
Measurement of Child Mental Health
A wide range of assessment tools are available to measure child mental health. These include fully structured interviews (for example, Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children [K-SADS], Interview Schedule for Children [ISC]) and semistructured interviews (for example, Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children [DISC], Diagnostic Interview for Children and Adolescents [DICA]). In addition to assessment of child behavior through interviews, there are rating
METHOD
The data for this study were taken from the Mater-University Study of Pregnancy and its outcomes. Of 8,556 women who presented at a major public hospital for their antenatal care who were approached to participate in the study, 8,458 agreed. Of these, 7,421 mothers gave birth to a live, single baby at the study hospital. Excluded from the study were patients who were under the care of private obstetricians and patients who were transferred from other hospitals. Interviewing for this first phase
RESULTS
The following results are presented for 2 subscales identified by Achenbach (1991a) as Internalizing, which comprises withdrawn, anxious/depressed, and somatic problems, and Externalizing, which comprises delinquent and aggressive behavior. Scores for Total Problems, which include Internalizing and Externalizing and a number of additional items, are also provided. It must, however, be noted that the Maternal Report CBCL and the YSR subscales do not always contain the same items. For the 14-year
DISCUSSION
In the absence of a “gold standard,” a problem that characterizes all psychiatric diagnosis (whether of adults or youths), the determination of bias in the maternal CBCL reports derived from emotionally disturbed mothers is necessarily a matter of inference. Richters' (1992) review suggesting that there was insufficient evidence to support a case of maternal bias in the reporting of their child's behavior problems has since been questioned by the findings of Fergusson et al. (1993), Boyle and
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The authors thank NHMRC, Queensland Health, and the Australian Institute of Criminology for funding this project.