A Trifactor Model Approach to Understand School-Aged Children’s Psychosocial Adjustment: Integrating Father, Mother, and Teacher Perspectives

This study examined factors contributing to shared and unique perspectives among fathers’, mothers’, and teachers’ ratings of school-aged children’s psychosocial adjustment among military families. Utilizing baseline data from three randomized controlled trials of a preventive parenting program (N = 870, 51.7% girls; M_age = 8.13; 12.7% fathers and 12.8% mothers identified as people of color), we first described the pattern of informant (dis)agreement on children’s psychosocial adjustment rated using the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC). Using trifactor models, this study explored factors associated with informants’ shared and unique perspectives. Moderate-to-strong correlations between similar informants and small-to-moderate correlations between distinct informants were observed. Parental efficacy, parental distress, and couple relationships were related to parental shared and unique perspectives of children’s internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and adaptive functioning. These results emphasize the complexity of accessing child psychosocial adjustment, and highlights the need for multi-informant assessment in future research and practice.