Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry (2010) 19:371–377 DOI 10.1007/s00787-009-0061-4 O R I G I N A L C O N T R I B U T I O N The role of acquaintanceship in the perception of child behaviour problems Gert Kroes Æ Jan W. Veerman Æ Eric E. J. De Bruyn Received: 7 May 2008 / Accepted: 9 September 2009 / Published online: 13 October 2009 The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract The role of acquaintanceship with the child on reports of child behaviour by different informants was examined within the framework of a general theory of personality judgment. Mothers of referred children and group-care workers rated videotaped behaviour samples of a well known and an unknown child in the clinic. Inde- pendent observers also rated the videotapes. In line with the acquaintanceship hypothesis, mothers were found to perceive more behaviour problems than independent observers when rating well known children but not unknown children. Contrary to the acquaintanceship hypothesis, however, the group-care workers in our study reported more behaviour problems than the other infor- mants regardless of their acquaintance with the children. The clinical and methodological implications of these ﬁndings are discussed. Keywords Informant bias Child assessment Acquaintanceship effect Introduction Assessment of child behaviour problems greatly relies upon reports of such adult informants as parents, teachers and child care professionals. However, only modest agreement is typically found between the reports of G. Kroes (&) J. W. Veerman Praktikon, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: g.kroes@acsw.ru.nl E. E. J. De Bruyn Department of Social Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands different informants and the question is which informant provides the most accurate information regarding a par- ticular child [2, 15]. A large body of research has further shown both the accuracy of an individual source of infor- mation and the degree of consensus among informants to heavily depend upon various situational and informant characteristics [2, 13, 17]. These characteristics include the consistency of child behaviours across situations, the amount of behavioural information available to the infor- mant, motivation on the part of the informant, personality of the informant and acquaintanceship with the child [22]. Some of the most contradictory results with regard to the perception of child behaviour problems concern the impact of acquaintanceship with the child [10, 11]. In some studies, acquaintanceship is deﬁned in terms of a family (i.e., parent–child) relationship, but in other studies a broader range of ‘acquaintances’ such as peers, teachers, or group-care workers has been included. In the present study, we will use the term acquaintanceship in the sense of ‘knowing a person well’ for all types of acquaintance or familiarity with the child, including family relationships. Acquaintanceship has been found to affect perceptions of child behaviour in very different—and apparently incon- sistent—manners. For instance, Kendziora and O’Leary [11] reported a tendency for mothers to provide more favourable appraisals of their own children’s behaviour as opposed to other children’s behaviour. Consequently, they concluded that the behavioural appraisals of the mother’s in their study were biased when compared to the appraisals of independent observers. In other studies, no such differ- ential effect of acquaintanceship has been reported [21] or mixed results have been reported [18]. In the study by Snarr et al. [18], for example, the mothers of oppositional boys showed a negative interpretive tendency while the mothers of control children showed a positive interpretive 123