| Abstract: | Parents and adolescents often provide different ratings of youths' behavior problems, yet few studies have examined such disagreement and its effect on later adjustment, especially among at‐risk adolescents. The purpose of this study was to investigate, among a sample of adolescents in foster care, whether the degree of caregiver–adolescent disagreement on adolescents' internalizing problems would be associated with adolescent externalizing problem behaviors over time. Two measures of adolescent caregiver agreement, the Pearson's r and intraclass correlations, were used with data drawn from a nationally representative study of children on foster care. Growth curve analyses of 180 adolescents revealed that the higher adolescent and caregiver agreement on adolescents' internalizing problems at Wave I, the slower the increase in externalizing problems over time. |
