Adolescents' proxy reports of parents' socioeconomic status: How valid are they?

Abstract

Study objective-Children's proxy reports on indicators of their parents' socioeconomic status (SES) have either been used uncritically or dismissed as invalid. This paper examines the validity of young adolescents' reports of parental SES by comparing adolescent reports with parents' own reports of SES. Design, setting and participants-In 1990, 924 13 year olds, along with 648 of their fathers and 735 of their mothers, participated in the baseline survey of The Norwegian Longitudinal Health Behaviour Study. Data on parental occupation were collected from both adolescents and parents at baseline, while data on parental education were collected at follow up from the adolescents at age 15 and from their parents when the adolescents were 19 years old. Main results-Three diVerent ways of grouping the SES categories based on occupational data were investigated, and the strength of agreement was good for all three groups, with statistics ranging from 0.65 to 0.86. There were no significant improvements of agreement when comparing adolescent data from age 15 to adolescent data from age 13. The strength of agreements between the adolescents' and parents' reports of parental education were fair; statistics were 0.30 and 0.38 for fathers' and mothers' education, respectively. The proportions of unclassified answers or no responses from the adolescents were similar for questions on occupation and education, and ranged from 11% to 16%. Conclusions-The agreement between adolescents' and parents' reports of SES based on occupation was judged to be good, but adding a few specific questions may cue the adolescent to provide more detailed information, thereby reducing the numbers of unclassified answers or non-responders. (J Epidemiol Community Health 2001;55:731-737) Over the past two decades there has been a marked increase in research on the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and health, and the focus has shifted from investigating the relation between health outcomes and SES to investigating the mechanisms behind such relations.

Assessing social differences in overweight among 15- to 16-year-old ethnic Norwegians from Oslo by register data and adolescent self-reported measures of socio-economic status

“…35 The occupational measure was based on the adolescents' reports, but although the proportion of missing could be substantial on this type of question, the adolescents are usually able to provide valid answers. 14,15 There were, however, some difficulties in assigning the occupations into different social groups, especially the upper managerial group. Social desirability in reporting could bias the association between BMI and SES as both were self-reported.…”

“…Measuring the SES of adolescents is much discussed owing to the difficulty of obtaining valid data on parental SES, [12][13][14][15] and because adolescents have not obtained their own SES. Friestad et al 16 studied the stability of educational plans in a longitudinal study, and found that planning for academic studies showed high stability between ages 13 and 15, and did track into studying rather than working at age 18.…”

Associations between socio-economic status and school-day dietary intake in a sample of grade 5–8 students in Vancouver, Canada

“…Students with missing data (compared with the reference group) were not significantly different in likelihood of reporting daily dietary intake outcomes and inclusion of the variable for missing data did not substantially change the significance or point estimates of other coefficients. Further, previous studies have shown acceptable consistency between child-and parent-reported measures of father's and mother's education (52) and alternative student reports of SES, such as household affluence (53,54) . Although we acknowledge the limitations inherent in using studentreported parent education, the selection of this variable as a primary explanatory variable was based on our review of the literature and evidence that parent education is the most frequently used measure in nutrition research to evaluate child and adolescent SES (6,(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)44,55) , particularly in adolescent nutrition studies (27)(28)(29)(30)(31) .…”

Pathways and mechanisms in adolescence contribute to adult health inequalities

“…The validity of the information on parental occupation given by the adolescents has been investigated in several studies, most often by comparing these data with information supplied by the parents and calculating percentage-agreement and Kappa coefficients [210][211][212][213][214][215][216][217]. All of the studies conclude that adolescents were able to give reliable information concerning their parent's occupation.…”