Research at CAIP Lab broadly seeks to improve how researchers and practitioners measure child and family behavior.  With a specific focus on clinical assessments of adolescent social anxiety and community based assessments of parent-adolescent conflict, the CAIP Lab conducts basic research on the reasons why different measures of child and family behavior often reveal different things about children and families.  The CAIP Lab then uses this basic research to develop new measurement technologies to administer in applied research and clinical practice settings.  Along these lines, research conducted in the CAIP Lab is founded under the following principles of psychological science:

First, human behavior, even specific expressions of it (anxiety, aggression, mood, parenting, stress, pain), cannot be adequately represented with a single assessment or number.  Proper psychological assessments require use of a broad variety of approaches that collective make use of multiple measurement methods (e.g., structured interviews, questionnaires, laboratory observations) and information sources (e.g., self-report, significant others like parents and spouses, teachers, official records, biological indices).

Second, when researchers and practitioners implement comprehensive measurement strategies, they often encounter inconsistent outcomes among the individual assessments conducted as part of this strategy.  For example, teacher reports may not (and often do not) yield same conclusions as parent reports or clinicians' interpretations of diagnostic tests.  These inconsistencies often make it difficult to determine the answers to very important questions such as: "Does this child evidence symptoms of a diagnosable condition?"  "What treatment approach should I use to help this child with his or her problems?" "Does this treatment that I am studying 'work'?"

Third, when inconsistent assessment outcomes arise, it is often the case that  these inconsistencies are attributed to the measures being unreliable or the informants providing biased responses.  To date, research in the CAIP Lab does not find many situations in which these factors adequately explain these inconsistencies.  Thus, it is crucial to conduct studies that test whether inconsistencies reflect measure unreliability, informant biases, or perhaps meaningful information on the behavior being rated, such as that behaviors being rated happen more at school rather than home. 

Fourth, researchers and practitioners often use multiple measures of the same behavior in order to understand whether the behavior changes depending on the situation.  An example might be a research study in which parent reports of aggression were administered to understand how children in the sample behaved at home, and teacher reports of aggression were administered to understand children’s school behavior.  Under these and a variety of other circumstances, inconsistencies across multiple measures might signify that the behavior being assessed changes, depending on the situation.  For instance, inconsistencies between parent and teacher reports might signify that the child being rated differs in whether s/he is primarily aggressive in home versus school settings.

Fifth, if measurement inconsistencies reflect meaningful differences in behavior exhibited across situations, this information can be used to understand how behavior changes from situation to situation and across multiple time points.

Lastly, measurement inconsistencies reflecting meaningful differences in expressions of the behavior being rated may potentially inform our understanding of the identification of specific behaviors (e.g., depressive disorders), development of specific behaviors (e.g., anxiety, oppositional behaviors), and the outcomes of treatments developed to target specific behaviors (e.g., parenting interventions for childhood oppositional behavior, cognitive-behavioral treatments for adult social anxiety).