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Informant Discrepancies in Suicidality Screening Tools Among School Age Youth

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Abstract

As the rate of death by suicide in youth ages 6 to 12 rises, it is imperative to better understand informant discrepancies when screening for suicidality. Accordingly, this study investigated associations among youth-, caregiver-, and clinician-reports of youth’s suicidality and their associations with youth- and caregiver-reports of youth’s depressive symptoms. Participants were 161 6- to 12-year-old youth presenting for outpatient psychological services at a Midwest training clinic between 2014 and 2019. More than 1 in 4 youth had at least one informant report some suicidal concerns. Results indicated that all informants’ reports of suicidality were correlated with one another, with youth- and clinician-report being most strongly linked and caregiver- and clinician-report having the weakest correlation. Clinician- and youth-reports of suicidality were associated with youth-report, (but not caregiver-report) of depressive symptoms. Caregiver-report of suicidality was not associated with youth- or caregiver-report of depressive symptoms. When youth-report of depressive symptoms was regressed on sex, age, and youth-, caregiver-, and clinician-reports of suicidality, there was a trend that youth-report of suicidality was positively associated with youth-report of depressive symptoms. No informant’s report of suicidality was uniquely associated with caregiver-report of depressive symptoms. Findings indicate that youth- and clinician-reports at intake are more strongly linked with one another than with caregiver-reports. Further, youth-reports on suicidality screening tools are more strongly associated with depressive symptoms than caregiver-report, suggesting that caregiver-reports are insufficient to assess concerns of suicidality at intake among school age youth.

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Notes

  1. For brevity, “youth” will be used to refer to individuals between birth and age 18.

  2. The term suicidality will be used throughout this paper as an umbrella term to include both suicidal ideation (thoughts or plans) and suicide attempts, as well as deliberate self-harm, which has been shown to be predictive of future suicide attempts [70].

  3. In this paper, we use Cohen’s interpretive descriptions of correlation coefficients to describe the magnitude of correlations; 0.10 = “small,” 0.30 = “medium,” and 0.50 = “large” [71].

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  1. Clinical Child Psychology Program, University of Kansas, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue Dole HDC Rm 2006, 66045, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Rachel L. Doyle & Paula J. Fite

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  1. Rachel L. Doyle
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Correspondence to Rachel L. Doyle.

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Doyle, R.L., Fite, P.J. Informant Discrepancies in Suicidality Screening Tools Among School Age Youth. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 55, 394–404 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-022-01412-w

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