1. Objectifs

Intentions :
- « The objectives of this article are (1) to do a transcultural comparison of the types and rates of psychiatric symptoms of young Central American and Cambodian refugees reported by two different informants (parent and child) and (2) to examine parent-child agreement in the reporting of symptoms in these two cultural groups. » (p. 629)
- « In this article we look solely at the emotional profile of the young refugees. » (p. 630)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
- « [...] two surveys of young Central American and Cambodian refugees living on the Island of Montreal. The first was of elementary school and the second was of high school students. [...] who met the following criteria were invited to take part : (1) enrolled in third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth grade; (2) of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador) or Cambodia origin; (3) born outside Canada; and (4) neither physically or mentally disabled. » (p. 630)
- « The elementary school sample consisted of 67 Cambodian and 56 Central American subjects , while there were 76 cambodians and 82 Central Americans in the high school sample. » (p. 630)

Instruments :
- Schéma d’entrevue semi-structuré;
- CBCL (Achenbach and Edelbrock, 1983);
- YSR (Achenbach, 1991);
- Pictural scale (Valla et al., 1993, 1994) (Dominic).

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

« Objective: To compare the types and rates of psychiatric symptoms of young Central American and Cambodian refugees, as reported by both parents and children, and to examine parent-child agreement in reporting symptoms. Method: Interviews were conducted with 123 children, aged 8 to 12 years and 158 adolescents aged 12 to 16 and their parents. Parents assessed psychiatric symptoms via the Child Behavior Checklist, the 8 to 12 years-old responded to the Dominic, and the adolescents answered the Youth Self-Report. Means of Internalizing and Externalizing scores were compared on the basis of ethnic origin, parent’s sex, and child’s sex, as were the Spearman correlation coefficients opf parents’ and childrens’ ratings. Results: The Cambodian parents reported few symptoms in their children, and the Central Americans reported almost as many symptoms as did parents in the U.S. clinical samples. The cambodian children reported less symptoms than the Central Americans, btu the interenthic difference was not significant in the adolescents’ self-reports. Parents-child agreement varied considerably by sex and ethnic origins of the informant. Conclusions: The results underscore the need to involve multiple informants in assessing psychiatric symptoms of refugee children in spite of the difficulties inherent in field research with this population. They also show that data on multiple informants gathered from Western samples are not universally valid. » (p. 629)