Does Parent or Child Know Best? an Assessment of Parent/Child Agreement in the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth

We use data from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth to address two questions. To what extent do parents and children agree when asked identical questions about child well-being? To what extent do differences in their responses affect what one infers from multivariate analysis of the data? The correspondence between parent and child in the assessment of child well-being is only slight to fair. Agreement is stronger for more observable outcomes, such as schooling performance, and weaker for less observable outcomes, such as emotional disorders. We regress both sets of responses on a standard set of socio-economic characteristics. We also conduct formal and informal tests of the differences in what one would infer from these two sets of regressions.