Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (CYBOCS-2)

The Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Goodman et al., 1989; Scahill, Riddle, Mcswiggin-Hardin, & Ort, 1997) was designed to assess OCD symptomology and severity in children (8 – 17 years of age). Since its development it was revised in 2004 (Storch et al., 2010), and a second edition is freely available. This is a semi-structured interview, clinician-rated tool. In research the tool is a primary outcome measure for clinical or behaviour treatment trials. Clinicians can use the tool to track the progress of patients. Although this was not designed to be a diagnostic tool, the symptom checklist if often employed as a diagnostic aid. Administering the tool revolves around a semi-structured interview with the patient. Depending on the age of the child, or anxiety levels, a parent may be present. The clinician and the child go through a symptom checklist identifying the most prominent symptoms, past and present (last 30 days). Then the clinician asks 10 questions (5 items regarding severity and 5 items regarding obsessions) and rates the child’s answers on a 6-point scale. An overall score is produced at the end to track progress. The scale has been show to have excellent psychometric properties. It has high internal consistency of both the severity scale (alpha = .89) and the obsession scale obsession scale (alpha = .86). The tool is freely available on Google, however when used for research purposes the author must be contacted.

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