BACKGROUND: Outcome measures are routinely used in child and adolescent mental health services to demonstrate the effectiveness or otherwise of interventions. METHODS: We followed up a consecutive sample from a large teaching hospital's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) service for young people, comparing improvements using instruments of differing broadness. RESULTS: The effect size of improvement decreased as the breadth of the questionnaire increased. CONCLUSION: Specialist clinics are recommended to use two questionnaires: a broad one to facilitate comparability with other clinics, and a narrow one to maximise power to detect significant changes.
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Lee et al. (2005) studied this question.
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