Agreement between Parent and Child Reports on Parental Behaviors

This research studies parent-child agreement on parenting behaviors and mediators of agreement for 134 families. Results of the multitrait-multi- method analyses reveal a low degree of agree- ment between parents and children in reports of parental behaviors. Differential levels of agree- ment between father-child and mother-child re- ports suggest that reports of parental behaviors might be related to children's transition from preadolescence to early adolescence, family structure, and children's characteristics. The in- fluence of these factors implies that the differ- ences in reports between parents and children are not random and the practice of aggregating scores across reporters within the family to inte- grate data may not be justified.