Introduction: Given the increasing prevalence of mental health problems in the general population, it is indispensable to use assessment tools aimed to assess the outcome of therapeutic interventions in order to refine the process of psychological rehabilitation.
Method: We describe the process of adaptation into Spanish and a first psychometric study of the Young Person's- Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (YP-CORE), an instrument designed to measure the outcome in terms of general distress of therapeutic interventions in young people (11-16 years). 104 adolescents participated in the clinical and 131 in the non-clinical samples.
Results: Analyses showed good levels of acceptability, adequate internal consistency and acceptable test-retest stability, with moderately high correlations between administrations. In addition, the instrument yielded significant correlations with all dimensions of the Youth Self Report, the highest being between both total scores. Crucially, discriminated between clinical and non-clinical samples and showed a small effect of age but a larger effect of gender, with higher scores for females. The Principal Component Analysis replicates the original structure. Cut-off scores to calculate the reliable and clinically significant change are provided.
Conclusions: These results support initial use of the instrument though there are certain limitations that indicate the need for more research with larger and more representative samples, in which the psychometric properties of the instrument should be verified.