Poster #168 - Parent-child discrepancies in reports of trauma symptoms: Implications for family engagement in high-risk youth interventions

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Prevention and Interventions

Integrative Statement

Background - Parent involvement in intervention efforts is identified as a key factor for improvements in children’s trauma symptoms (Cohen, Mannarino, & Deblinger, 2006; Santiago, Fuller, Lennon, & Kataoka, 2016). Specifically, interventions to reduce psychological symptoms resulting from exposure to trauma are more successful when they foster active participation from parents as partners in shared-goal and program development, decision-making, and accountability in students outcomes (Affronti & Levison-Johnson, 2009; Boberiene, 2013; Garbacz et al., 2017; Reschly & Christenson, 2012; Sheridan et al., 2011). Forging partnerships with parents, in turn, necessitates parents’ perspectives are solicited and respected, particularly their perceptions of their child’s experience of traumatic events and any resulting symptoms they observe. However, intervention practitioners are presented with a challenge, as parent and child reports are known to significantly differ. This disparity has implications for 1) how programs engage and respond to parents, and 2) design targeted services based on the reports they receive.
Current effort - This presentation includes data from a multisite, longitudinal trauma-informed initiative for students in K-8th grade. Aspire Connect Thrive (ACT) uses a two-group experimental design, serving a treatment school and a matched comparison school in a disadvantaged community that carries a high trauma exposure rate. The goal of ACT is to bolster children’s social-emotional skills and resilience while reducing trauma symptoms by providing children and their families clinical interventions during school, a peer mentorship program, afterschool/summer enrichment programs, teacher professional development, a family text campaign, family enrichment and general resource case management.
Methods - Participants (n=208, 39.9% female, Mage=8.5 years) include ACT students at the treatment and comparison sites enrolled for the Fall of 2017. Measures include the parent and child-report forms of the Child Trauma Screen (CTS, Lang & Connell, 2017), and UCLA Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Reaction Index Analysis (PTSD RI, Steinberg et al., 2013). Dyads completed the CTS as part of each year’s data collection procedure; CTS total scores above the clinical cut-off on the parent- or child-report forms were immediately referred to the program’s clinical staff who completed the PTSD RI. Our analysis includes a descriptive examination of discrepancies between parent- and child-reported trauma symptoms; we examine differential reports by symptom and total CTS score, as well as clinician reported PTSD RI outcomes.
Results – Fewer than 3% of parent-reports (n=6) reached the clinical cut-off on the Child Trauma Screen, compared to over 10% based on child self-reports (n=23); only n=1 of these were congruent reports from parent and child. Of these n=28 total cases, clinical administration of the PTDS RI indicated n=2 met the criteria for a DSM V diagnosis of PTSD. See Figure 1 for congruence between reporters.
Discussion – The se results provide evidence of a steep differential in reports of trauma symptomology between parent- and child-reports and demonstrate the necessity of multiple-source ratings of crucial data points that carry clinical implications. This practice can improve the validity of the data by protecting against mis-identification of clinically relevant information about the child and about the parent-child relationship.

Authors

• Beth Russell, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Morica Hutchison, The University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author

• Donna Ferguson, The Village for Children and Families
  Non-Presenting Author