Agreement between parent reported and child self-reported sport-related concussion history: A brief report

Abstract

This cross sectional investigation measured the agreement between parent report of their 8–14 year old child’s sport-related concussion (SRC) history and their child’s self-report of their own SRC history. Parent–child dyads (n = 405) within a youth contact sports (e.g., football, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer) setting participated in the study. Parents (6.2%) and 8.6% of children self-reported a history of at least one diagnosed SRC. We observed substantial agreement between the number of parent-reported and child self-reported SRCs (κ = 0.613, p ≤ .001). Partial agreement regarding the number of SRCs reported by both groups was also substantial (weighted κ = 0.693, p ≤ .001). Removing dyads where neither the parent nor the child reported a diagnosed SRC, sensitivity analyses revealed only fair agreement in parent–child SRC recall. These results indicate that parents and youth athletes overall accounts of their diagnosed SRC history correspond. However determining specifics (e.g., total concussion counts) may benefit from concurrent parent reports, or documented events in medical histories.

Keywords:

• Child
• concussion
• disclosure
• reporting behaviors
• youth athlete

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be made available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Penn Injury Science Center under Grant CDC R49 CE 003083 (ACB); the NIH NHLBI Training Program in Respiratory Neurobiology and Sleep under Grant T32 HL 007713 (ACB); and the NIH NINDS Brain Injury Training Grant under Grant T32 NS 043126 (ACB).