Comparison of Mothers' and Child-Minders' Ratings of Toddlers' Temperament: An Inter-rater Reliability Study

This study reports on an assessment of temperament by mothers and child-minders of twenty five 2–3-year-old children, using eight factors of the Short Temperament Scale for Toddlers (Prior, Sanson and Oberklaid, 1989). Issues highlighted are the function of temperament in behavioural adjustment and the problems associated with cross-informant congruence in evaluating traits and behaviours. Both Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient and generalised kappa were used to assess the degree of inter-rater reliability between child-minders. High inter-rater agreement was found on the “easy-difficult” scale of temperament, r=.821 (mean of three raters) and moderately high agreement on the “approach/adaptability” factor, k = .638. Inter-rater agreement was low for the other seven temperament factors. Agreement between mothers and child-minders was low on the “easy-difficult” scale, r = .262. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies. The relevance of inter-rater reliability studies as an area of concern to health care delivery is also discussed