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Despite their practical advantages, report measures have limitations in the current climate of research. These include the risk of informant bias, their clinical nature and that they primarily offer a snapshot of the child’s development at a specific time-point, rather than informing researchers about the child’s developmental status over time.

4.2.1 Informant bias

Many report assessments of behaviour and language are completed by parents or caregivers of children, or their teachers. Therefore, they are at risk of reflecting a substantial degree of bias towards the parent’s or teacher’s opinion of the child in question (Youngstrom, Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber, 2000). There is also a risk of bias towards the interpretation or

presumptions of these individuals in terms of what the researcher is looking for, creating results that may lack ecological validity. There are often discrepancies between informants with regard to ratings of child characteristics (De Los Reyes and Kazdin, 2005). Redmond and Rice (1998) found discrepancies between parent and teacher ratings of children’s emotional and behavioural difficulties. Similarly, Lundervold, Heimann and Manger (2008) report moderate to low agreement between parents and teachers on behaviour; however, they found that agreement increased in ratings of behaviour-emotional problems in children with language impairment. Parents may be more reluctant than teachers to report negative aspects of their children’s ability while teachers may be more sensitive to disruptive behaviour (therefore less sensitive to other behaviours), and in addition their reports may be influenced by the quality of teacher–child relationships (Youngstrom, Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber, 2000). Prevalence of a disorder may be under- or over-represented depending upon whether a teacher or parent is the informer (De Los Reyes and Kazdin, 2005); for example, ratings of comorbid internalising and externalising behaviours in children have been found to be greater in parent reports and lower in teacher reports (Youngstrom, Findling and Calabrese, 2003). Furthermore, there is evidence that parental mental health status such as levels of depression and anxiety, or psychological functioning such as stress, may influence reporting, with evidence suggesting mothers with more mental health difficulties report more behaviour

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problems in their children (Najman et al., 2000, 2001) and levels of depression and stress being related to higher disagreement with other informants (Youngstrom, Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber, 2000). With regard to language assessment, there is less research indicating discrepancies between informants. Moderate levels of agreement on reports have been found between parents and teachers, with parent ratings being more closely related to clinical reports (Bishop and Baird, 2001). There is an issue here that perhaps behaviour is more context-dependent than language, if more informant discrepancies are found for ratings of children’s behaviour.

4.2.2 Clinical limitations

As mentioned above, a further limitation of using reports for measurement is their underlying clinical nature. Most existing research into behaviour and language which employs reports investigates their relationship in clinical populations, where it is clear to see overlap between disorders (such as language deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorders), as opposed to non- clinical populations in mainstream education.

Some reports have normative data which may be used to reference the child’s ability to that of the typical population. Therefore, a child may be considered to possess a deficit if he or she scores significantly below typical expectation (Paul, 1997). In the case of language, a child’s language problem must have adaptive consequences to be significant enough to be labelled atypical and therefore a ‘deficit’ (Paul, 1997). However, when exploring atypical

development, the extent to which a problem is representative of a delay in development, or represents a deviance from normality, must be taken into account (Karmiloff-Smith and Ansari, 2003). There must be a clear distinction between difficulties that indicate a disorder and difficulties that represent a characteristic (Rapin, 2011). Report assessments must be sensitive to this. This is especially true in relation to children who are less severely impaired. As previously stated, report assessments often provide categorical cut-off points for

identifying the child’s degree of difficulty in terms of severity, and normative data provides comparison of scores with the ‘normal’ population. Such considerations are important. Dismissing a delay in development as insignificant may be negligent as it presumes that the ability delayed is operating independently of other developmental trajectories, that interaction with other developmental systems will not occur (Karmiloff-Smith and Ansari, 2003), which of course, due the interactive nature of development, may not be the case. This is where standardised assessments may falter. They may capture the child’s ability at a specific time- point. However, we may question how accurate these assessments are and the degree to which

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they can inform us about a child’s developmental status; a delayed ability may still develop into deviance from the norm.

4.2.3 Additional limitations

Other significant limitations common to the measurement of behaviour and language using reports include that they are unable to provide information as to why a behaviour or language difficulty has occurred, the context in which they occur, and also what variables are

maintaining those difficulties. They also provide a picture of a child’s ability in one domain

yet are unable to provide any insight into overlapping difficulties, the extent of their overlap, or the dynamics between them. Furthermore, they are unable to inform how reported

characteristics impact on children’s interactions. In attempting to examine the wider picture of children’s abilities, many researchers employ multiple assessment reports. In cases where overlapping difficulties are investigated, correlational analysis techniques of each report data may be used. However, this method still lacks ecological validity. The complex nature of comorbid difficulties, including individual variance in comorbid extremities, makes it difficult to rely solely on these correlations as evidence of overlap. As mentioned in Chapter 3, it may be argued that perhaps what is correlated are, at their most basic, the opinions of the

informants, rather than the actual behaviours themselves. Such techniques may provide for interesting insights; however, they should be met with caution as regards what they imply, and in terms of generalisation to the wider population.

The investigation of the nature and extent of children’s abilities is more suitably addressed by using naturalistic methods of measurement. Furthermore, the investigation of comorbidity may be improved upon by taking a closer look at the relationship between difficulties, by

observing behaviour and language as they occur together in the real world.