Multirater congruence on the social skills rating system: mother, father, and teacher assessments of urban head start children’s social competencies

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Abstract

This study examined the relationships between parent and teacher and between mother and father SSRS reports of 134 urban Head Start children to assess the cross-informant capacity of the SSRS. The findings documented an insignificant relationship between parent and teacher SSRS ratings of children’s social competence. The results revealed significant congruence between SSRS ratings of mothers and fathers. Mothers and fathers who reported higher levels of sharing childcare responsibilities evidenced higher levels of agreement on SSRS ratings of children. This study discusses the importance of Head Start staff, parent, and research partnerships for developing scales that have the capacity to foster home-school communications about children.

Section snippets

Participants

This study was conducted as part of a larger investigation of the impact of a father involvement program on pre-kindergarten Head Start children. Teacher, mother, and father SSRS ratings were obtained on 134 preschoolers from 23 classrooms. The classrooms were located in eight separate locations, with approximately three classrooms in each site, in a large urban setting. The city public school system administers this full-day Head Start program.

All participating teachers had earned at least a

Mother-teacher comparison

Pearson correlation coefficients were obtained for the four mother SSRS factors and five teacher SSRS factors (see Table 2). The profile obtained showed no significant relationship between these two measures. None of the 20 correlation coefficients yielded in these analyses were statistically significant. Moreover, canonical analysis revealed no significant relationship between mother and teacher SSRS factors [Wilks’ lambda = .85, F (20,422) = 1.03, p = .42].

Father-teacher comparison

Table 2 presents the Pearson

Discussion

The primary objective of this study was to examine the relationships between parent and teacher SSRS reports of children to assess the cross-informant capacity of the SSRS. The findings support the hypothesis of an insignificant relationship between parent and teacher SSRS ratings of children’s social competence. No significant multivariate relationships were found between teachers and mothers and between teachers and fathers across the teacher and parent versions of the SSRS.1 These results

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Children, Youth, and Families (Head Start-University Partnerships: Translating Research into Practice), Grant # 90-YD-002, awarded to Jay Fagan. The authors wish to thank Dr. Esther Kresh of ACYF and the Head Start parents, teachers, and children for their support.

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