Can we trust parent reports in research on cultural and ethnic differencesin child psychopathology? Using the bicultural family design to test parental culture effects

Research comparing cultural and ethnic groups on child psychopathology has relied heavily on parent reports. But don't parents' own cultural backgroun ds bias their reports, undermining valid assessment of actual child behavio r? The question is hard to address because parent and child culture tend to be confounded. To solve this problem, we assembled an unusual but heuristi cally valuable sample: 50 bicultural families, each with an ethnic Thai par ent reared in Thailand and a Caucasian parent reared in the U.S. Parents in each pair independently completed standardized problem checklists on the s ame child in their family. Across all 10 empirically derived problem syndro mes, no parental culture effect was either significant or larger than "smal l," by Cohen's (1988) standards; across all 140 specific problems, the mean percent of variance accounted for by parent culture was less than 1%. Resu lts do not point to a biasing effect of parental culture.