Original title: Agreement Between Prospective and Retrospective Measures of Childhood Maltreatment
Researchers compared two ways of identifying childhood maltreatment: information recorded while a person was a child, and that person’s later report as an adult. Across 16 studies with 25,471 people, the two measures agreed poorly. Agreement was higher when adults were interviewed rather than asked to fill out questionnaires. This means the two methods may identify different groups of people.
Imagine two people sorting a box of old family photos to decide which ones show a difficult time. One sorts them using notes written back then; the other relies on what they remember now. They may choose different photos because the notes and memories do not match closely. In this paper, the notes stand for childhood records, the memories stand for adults’ later reports, and the different choices reflect poor agreement between the two measures.
Researchers and clinicians may assume that records made during childhood and adults’ later reports identify the same people. The review found poor agreement, so studies and services using one kind of measure may be looking at a different group from those using the other.
The review included only 16 studies with paired prospective and retrospective data, selected from 450 studies with prospective measures. The abstract does not establish why the measures disagree or whether one measure is more accurate. It also does not show that the different groups have different mental health outcomes; it notes this as a possible difference in risk pathways.
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Agreement Between Prospective and Retrospective Measures of Childhood Maltreatment — Jessie R. Baldwin, Aaron Reuben, Joanne B. Newbury et al. — JAMA Psychiatry — doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0097
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.