The Young Person's CORE: Development of a brief outcome measure for young people

Abstract

Background: There is a need for a user-friendly measure of change for use in school and youth counselling services which is easy for practitioners to administer and score, and which is appropriate for brief interventions. Aims: To develop such a measure and to present psychometric data on reliability, validity and sensitivity to change for the measure. Method: We employed a three-stage approach: first, creating a pool of potential items; second, developing an 18-item version; and third, refining to a final version comprising 10 items. We called the measure the Young Person's CORE (YP-CORE). Results: The measure comprised eight negative and two positive items and included a single (negatively-framed) risk-to-self item. Psychometric properties were all acceptable. Sensitivity to change was good and yielded an average improvement of 10 points on the YP-CORE in a clinical group, broadly equivalent to changes in adult versions (e.g. Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure (CORE-OM)). Conclusion: Initial validation work showed the measure to be well designed and sensitive to change. Analysis showed considerable variability as a function of age and gender suggesting the need for the collection of a large and diverse data set in order to produce gender and age-specific norms.

Keywords:

• CAMHS
• counselling
• outcomes
• measure validation
• young people
• YP-CORE

Acknowledgements

We thank the many practitioners and academics who assisted in development of the measure, and particularly those services that collected pilot data for the measure so assiduously. This research was funded by the NHS Priorities and Needs Research and Development Levy via Leeds Mental Health Teaching NHS Trust.