Congratulations to Reese Parks on the successful defense of her MSc thesis under the supervision of Dr. Ferro!
Reese’s thesis, “Anxiety disorder agreement among children with chronic physical illness and their parents,” looked at how closely children and their parents in the MY LIFE Study agreed when reporting anxiety disorders. She analyzed data collected over 48 months using the MINI-KID diagnostic interview.
Overall, she found that agreement between parents and children ranged from fair to substantial, and it tended to improve over time. Her work also pointed to several factors linked to disagreement. For instance, parent–child pairs with girls and those where parents had higher levels of psychopathology were less likely to agree. In contrast, parents who were not in partnered relationships were somewhat less likely to disagree with their child’s reports.
