Capturing Multiple Perspectives in a Multi-actor Survey: The Impact of Parental Presence During Child Interviews on Reporting Discrepancies

Abstract

Third-party presence is considered a potential threat to the quality of sensitive information gathered in face-to-face interviews. Issues arising from interference and reduced privacy due to bystander presence appear particularly pressing in child surveys: Parental presence is quite common and likely more pervasive as compared to other interviewee-bystander constellations. Focusing on surveys designed to capture multiple perspectives on the same issues, a key question is whether child interviews – in addition to parent information – can provide an independent opinion if parents are present during the interview. Using longitudinal multi-actor data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), the present study evaluates the impact of parental presence on child-parent discrepancies in survey reports on children’s problem behaviors and difficulties in the parent-child relationship. The longitudinal analysis of child-parent dyads allows for a more extensive consideration of selection processes of parental presence as compared to cross-sectional approaches. While descriptive results suggest that parent and child reports are more similar when parents are present, fixed-effects regression analyses do not find any effects of changes in parental presence on reporting discrepancies within child-parent dyads.