Agreement between children and parents demonstrated that illness-related absenteeism was validly reported by children

OBJECTIVES: To examine the agreement between children's and parents' reporting of illness-related absenteeism from school and to examine predictors for disagreement between children and parents.

STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: A total of 8,438 schoolchildren aged from 5 to 15 years (grade 0-8) and one parent of each child were invited to participate in the Hi Five baseline study. The response rate for children answering a questionnaire was 89% (n = 7,525), and 36% of the parents (n = 3,008) participated in a weekly illness registration study using text messages (short message service) over a period of 22 weeks. Text messages and questionnaire data were linked at the individual level, leaving 2,269 child-parent pairs in the analysis, corresponding to 27% of the eligible sample.

RESULTS: The agreement between children's and parents' reports of illness-related absenteeism was good, with high absolute agreement and slight to moderate Ƙ values. Agreement was lowest for 6- to 8-year-olds and highest for 11- to 12-year-olds. Children's reports of illness symptoms and parents' reports of their children's illnesses in the preceding week were strong predictors for children reporting illness-related absenteeism when parents did not.

CONCLUSION: Illness-related absenteeism can be reported by children, and children report higher prevalence of illness-related absenteeism than parents.