Stressful Experiences of Children: Professional Judgments

Abstract

To see whether professionals' assessments of the stressfulness of children's experiences correspond with those by the young, 39 clinicians (nurses, social workers, school psychologists, speech pathology, special education), 97 teachers, and 61 teachers-to-be rated 20 life events, first making professional judgments for children, and next, inferring judgments of children themselves. They also estimated the frequencies of these events. Within each group, there were close agreements not only between women and men, but also between the two kinds of judgments. Moreover, correlations among the three groups of adults, differing in specialty and experience, were all above .90. When compared with earlier responses by children themselves, however, the estimates by the professionals as a group correlated only .68 for scale values, .55 for Q values, .86 for frequencies. There were many instances of divergence, and adults' views did not approximate children's views too closely.