Using Multiple Informants Posted on March 19, 2007 Using multiple measures is important in depression research, maintains Judy Garber (bio).

Are there issues with regard to getting quality data from families with a depressed parent? There's a literature about well, do depressed parents report accurately about their children because of their depression, does that get in the way and the data on that are kind of mixed. I think some people have found that there is a relation. Others have found not as strong.

I think it tends more to be if it's an externalizing problem parents, a depressed parent may tend to report that more because they may have a lower threshold. They may not be as quick to see depression in their kids.

I don't think we really know that. I think it's important to get multiple informants. I think it's important to always talk to the child if you're interested in the child's functioning. But you also want to talk to the parent if possible, maybe the other parent, which is not always that easy. Getting teacher data is great, but it's very challenging because teachers are even more busy than they, or busier than they used to be.

So, yeah, multiple informants but then of course when you get multiple informants and they don't converge then you have the problem of figuring out what do you do with that information? So we analyze the data; looking at the separate informants and then you look to see whether or not you can put them into some sort of latent model and do they converge and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

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