Young Person's CORE YP-CORE
Young Person's CORE YP-CORE overview
Creator and Context
The Young Person's Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (YP-CORE) is a 10 item measure of general psychological distress in young people.
It was developed by Twigg, Barkham, Bewick, Mulhern, Connell and Cooper, and derived from the adult CORE-OM. Copyright is held by the CORE System Trust. Since 2015 the CORE instruments, including the YP-CORE, may be reproduced in software as well as on paper under a Creative Commons licence with no licence fee, provided the instrument is not changed in any way and copyright is acknowledged.
Presenting Conditions
The YP-CORE measures global psychological distress across the CORE domains of subjective wellbeing, problems and symptoms, functioning and risk. It deliberately produces a single score and has no subscales.
Item 4 is a self harm item and requires a risk response protocol wherever the measure is deployed digitally.
Administration
Self completed by the young person. Each item is rated over the last week on a 5 point scale from 0 to 4. Three positively worded items are reverse scored. Paper, PDF and online form versions are provided free by the CORE System Trust.
Desired Audience
Young people aged 11 to 16. Norms, cut offs and reliable change indices are published for the age bands 11 to 13 and 14 to 16, split by gender.
The YP-CORE is built for session by session monitoring. Its one week recall window and brevity make it one of the few youth measures you can realistically run every session, which is exactly what you need to detect deterioration early rather than at review.
Considerations
It is a generic distress measure. It does not differentiate anxiety from depression and produces no subscale profile.
The cut offs are not interchangeable across gender and age band. The clinical cut off for a 14 to 16 year old girl is more than five points higher than for an 11 to 13 year old boy. Applying a single threshold is a common and consequential implementation error.
Original clinical norms come predominantly from UK counselling settings rather than tier 3 CAMHS.
The instrument may not be modified in any way.
How to score the Young Person's CORE YP-CORE
Conducting the assessment
The young person rates 10 items for the last week on a 0 to 4 scale. If exactly one item is missing, the score can be pro rated. Do not pro rate when two or more items are missing.
Interpretation
Items are summed to give a clinical score from 0 to 40, where higher means more distress.
Clinically significant change cut off scores (Twigg et al., 2016):
Males aged 11 to 13: 10.3
Males aged 14 to 16: 14.1
Females aged 11 to 13: 14.4
Females aged 14 to 16: 15.9
The reliable change index for the overall sample is 7.9, so scores need to change by more than about 8 points to be considered reliable change.
Clinical Considerations
Apply the correct gender and age band cut off. Using one threshold for everyone will misclassify young people in both directions.
Use the reliable change index rather than reacting to small session to session movements.
Have a clear protocol for item 4. A self harm item collected digitally with no response pathway is a clinical risk, not a measure.
Young Person's CORE YP-CORE use cases
Session by session outcome monitoring with young people
Detecting deterioration early in a course of therapy
Service level outcome reporting in youth counselling services
Research in youth psychological therapies
Category
Children & Young People
Research Summary
Twigg, E., Barkham, M., Bewick, B. M., Mulhern, B., Connell, J., & Cooper, M. (2009). The Young Person's CORE: Development of a brief outcome measure for young people. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 9(3), 160 to 168.
Twigg, E., Cooper, M., Evans, C., Freire, E. S., Mellor-Clark, J., McInnes, B., & Barkham, M. (2016). Acceptability, reliability, referential distributions and sensitivity to change in the Young Person's Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (YP-CORE) outcome measure: Replication and refinement. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 21(2), 115 to 123.
Other Assessment Guides
Me and My Feelings Questionnaire
A guide to the Me and My Feelings questionnaire, the 16 item school based screen for emotional and behavioural difficulties in children. Covers the two subscales, cut offs and its limits as a screener.
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire SDQ Parent
A guide to the parent completed Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Covers the five scales, the four band scoring thresholds, the impact supplement and how to use it with teacher and self report versions.
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire SDQ Teacher
A guide to the teacher completed Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Covers the five scales, teacher specific four band thresholds and why teacher bands differ from parent bands.
Note on Assessment licensing
Some assessments are copyright protected and require a licence or the copyright holder's permission for clinical, commercial or digital use. Where that applies, obtaining and maintaining that permission is the responsibility of the practice or organisation using the assessment. Tacklit provides the digital administration, scoring and reporting. We do not grant, transfer or supply rights to the underlying instrument.
