Introduction to the Special Issue. A Dozen Years of Demonstrating That Informant Discrepancies are More Than Measurement Error: Toward Guidelines for Integrating Data from Multi-Informant Assessments of Youth Mental Health.

This research looks at how different people (parents, teachers, young people themselves) might give different answers about a child's mental health. Rather than these differences being mistakes, they might actually provide useful information. The researchers want to create better ways to understand and use these different perspectives together to get a more complete picture of a young person's mental health needs.

This introduction to a special journal issue reviews 12 years of research on informant discrepancies in youth mental health assessment. The authors argue that discrepancies between reports from different informants (parents, teachers, youth) are not simply measurement errors but contain meaningful information about youth mental health. The special issue aims to establish guidelines for integrating multi-informant data when these discrepancies provide domain-relevant information. The review highlights limitations of current strategies for combining multi-informant data and describes contributions covering various areas including autism, implementation science, measurement validation, and suicide assessment.

Assessment of youth mental health should incorporate multiple informant perspectives systematically rather than seeking a single 'correct' view. Clinicians should consider that discrepancies between parent, teacher, and youth reports may provide valuable clinical information about the young person's functioning across different contexts and relationships.

This is an introduction to a special issue rather than an empirical study. No specific sample size, methodology, or quantitative findings are reported. The abstract does not provide details about the strength of evidence from the 12 years of research being reviewed.

Validly characterizing youth mental health phenomena requires evidence-based approaches to assessment. An evidence-based assessment cannot rely on a "gold standard" instrument but rather, batteries of instruments. These batteries include multiple modalities of instrumentation (e.g., surveys, interviews, performance-based tasks, physiological readings, structured clinical observations). Among these instruments are those that require soliciting reports from multiple: People who provide psychometrically sound data about youth mental health (e.g., parents, teachers, youth themselves).

The January 2011 issue of the() included a Special Section devoted to the most common outcome of multi-informant assessments of youth mental health, namely discrepancies across informants' reports (i.e.,). The 2011Special Section revolved around a critical question: Might informant discrepancies contain data relevant to understanding youth mental health (i.e.,)? This Special Issue is a "sequel" to the 2011 Special Section. Since 2011, an accumulating body of work indicates that informant discrepancies often contain domain-relevant information.

Ultimately, we designed this Special Issue to lay the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations of guidelines for integrating multi-informant data when informant discrepancies contain domain-relevant information. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we briefly review the last 12 years of research and theory on informant discrepancies. This review highlights limitations inherent to the most commonly used strategies for integrating multi-informant data in youth mental health. We also describe contributions to the Special Issue, including articles about informant discrepancies that traverse multiple content areas (e.g., autism, implementation science, measurement validation, suicide).