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.
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Twigg et al. (2009) studied this question.