Past research indicates there is a discrepancy between parental and teachers’ report of aggressive behavior in children. Hinshaw et al. (1992) found that teachers’ ratings of externalizing behaviors demonstrated a stronger association with playgroup observation than the parental ratings in children between age 3 and 6. Parental and teachers’ ratings of preschool aged children with externalizing behavioral problems further yielded a low level of agreement between parents and teachers (Korsch and Petermann, 2013). Our present study, consists of parents and teachers of 44 girls and 71 boys aged three and four, collected from head start programs in southeast United States. The children’s teachers filled out Lafreniere and Duma’s Social Competence Behavioral Check Evaluation (SCBE) describing the children’s social emotional competence at school. Parents were asked to report observations and attributions of their children’s misbehaviors. Specifically, relationships between teachers’ ratings of aggressive-calm vs externalizing problems scores and parental attributions were assessed to examine whether these negative behaviors are mediated by parental attributions. The results and implications will be shared at the conference. A subsequent cross-cultural study in Italy and Spain will be introduced.
