Multi-Informant Assessments of Adolescent Social Anxiety: Adding Clarity by Leveraging Reports from Unfamiliar Peer Confederates.

Adolescent social anxiety (SA) assessments often include adolescent and parent reports, and low reporting correspondence results in uncertainties in clinical decision-making. Adolescents display SA within non-home contexts such as peer interactions. Yet, current methods for collecting peer reports raise confidentiality concerns, though adolescent SA assessments nonetheless would benefit from context-specific reports relevant to adolescent SA (i.e., interactions with unfamiliar peers). In a sample of 89 adolescents (30 Evaluation-Seeking; 59 Community Control), we collected SA reports from adolescents and their parents, and SA reports from unfamiliar peer confederates who interacted with adolescents during 20-minute mock social interactions. Adolescents and parents completed reports on trait measures of adolescent SA and related concerns (e.g., depressive symptoms), and adolescents completed self-reports of state arousal within mock social interactions. Adolescents' SA reports correlated with reports on parallel measures from parents in the .30s and with peer confederates in the .40s to .50s, whereas reports from parent-confederate dyads correlated in the .07 to .22 range. Adolescent, parent, and peer confederate SA reports related to reports on trait measures of adolescent SA and depressive symptoms, and distinguished Evaluation-Seeking from Community Control Adolescents. Confederates' SA reports incrementally predicted adolescents' self-reported SA over and above parent reports, and vice versa, with combined Rs ranging from .51 to .60. These combined Rs approximate typical correspondence levels between informants who observe adolescents in the same context (e.g., mother-father). Adolescent and peer confederate (but not parent) SA reports predicted adolescents' state arousal in social interactions. These findings have implications for clarifying patterns of reporting correspondence in clinical assessments of adolescent SA.

Convergent, incremental, and criterion-related validity of multi-informant assessments of adolescents' fears of negative and positive evaluation.

Adolescents who experience social anxiety tend to hold fears about negative evaluations (e.g., taunting) and may also hold fears about positive evaluations (e.g., praise from a teacher). The Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation (BFNE) scale and Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (FPES) are 2 widely used measures of adults' evaluative concerns. Yet we know little about their psychometric properties when assessing adolescents. In a mixed clinical/community sample of 96 adolescents (66.7% female; M = 14.50 years, SD = 0.50; 63.3% African American), we examined both self-report and parent report versions of the BFNE and FPES. Adolescents and parents also provided reports about adolescents on survey measures of social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Adolescents participated in multiple social interactions in which they self-reported their state arousal before and during the tasks. Adolescent and parent BFNE and FPES reports distinguished adolescents who displayed elevated social anxiety from those who did not. Both informants' reports related to survey measures of adolescent social anxiety, when accounting for domains that commonly co-occur with social anxiety (i.e., depressive symptoms). Further, both the BFNE and FPES displayed incremental validity in relation to survey measures of adolescent social anxiety, relative to each other. However, only adolescents' BFNE and FPES reports predicted adolescents' self-reported arousal within social interactions, and only adolescents' FPES displayed incremental validity in predicting self-reported arousal, relative to their BFNE. Adolescent and parent BFNE and FPES reports display convergent validity and in some cases incremental and criterion-related validity. These findings have important implications for evidence-based assessments of adolescents' evaluative concerns.