Assessing child-rearing behaviors: a comparison of ratings made by mother, father, child, and sibling on the CRPBI

This study of the reliability and validity of scales from the Child's Report of Parental Behavior (CRPBI) presents data on the utility of aggregating the ratings of multiple observers. Subjects were 680 individuals from 170 families. The participants in each family were a college freshman student, the mother, the father, and 1 sibling. The results revealed moderate internal consistency (M = .71) for all rater types on the 18 subscales of the CRPBI, but low interrater agreement (M = .30). The same factor structure was observed across the 4 rater types; however, aggregation within raters across salient scales to form estimated factor scores did not improve rater convergence appreciably (M = .36). Aggregation of factor scores across 2 raters yields much higher convergence (M = .51), and the 4-rater aggregates yielded impressive generalizability coefficients (M = .69). These and other analyses suggested that the responses of each family member contained a small proportion of true variance and a substantial proportion of factor-specific systematic error. The latter can be greatly reduced by aggregating scores across multiple raters.