Single item measure of parental history of agoraphobia: Agreement between adult children’s and parents’ own reports

Background: Agoraphobia has traditionally been grouped with panic disorder in clinical and research settings. However, it has recently been acknowledged as a distinct condition which can and does occur in the absence panic disorder. The genetic heritability of agoraphobia is high. It can be impractical or impossible to contact parents directly to assess their psychiatric history, often leading to the use of single item measures of parental psychiatric history (e.g., has your mother/father ever had agoraphobia?). This study examined the agreement between responses of adult children (n = 1,193) on a single item measure of parental agoraphobia history and their parents’ own responses on a single item measure of their own agoraphobia history.
Design: Data came from the Lifelines Cohort Study, which is a community-based study in the Netherlands. Parents self-reported if they had a history of agoraphobia. Kappa, sensitivity, selectivity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were calculated.
Results: There was moderate agreement between adult children’s reports of parental agoraphobia history and parents’ own reports of agoraphobia history (κ¬mothers = 0.47, κfathers = 0.40). Sensitivity ranged from 66.7% for mothers to 95.2% for fathers. Specificity was high for both mothers (91.8%) and fathers (97.8%).
Conclusion: Findings suggest that adult children may somewhat underestimate their fathers’ history of agoraphobia, while successfully identifying with high accuracy their mothers’ history of agoraphobia. This is the first study to examine the agreement between adult children’s reports of parental agoraphobia history and their parents’ own self-reports of agoraphobia history.