The Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale: Factor analytic evaluation and literature review

Abstract

The Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale is a semi-structured clinical-rated instrument for pediatric OCD symptom severity. Despite being widely used, the psychometric properties and factor structure of the scale have not been extensively studied. The existing literature reports inconsistent findings regarding the scale structure. The purpose of the current project is to evaluate the scale structure and item properties. The analysis was performed on a sample of 84 participants who were assessed at a pediatric OCD clinic in Sweden (ages 5–17). Using confirmatory factor analysis, a good fit was obtained for the scale structure. While this project does not directly solve the literature inconsistencies, it does shed light on how further research could learn from mistakes of prior research and evaluate the scale problems from a different perspective. Further research evaluating the inter-rater reliability of the items could provide further insight into possible measurement biases that could be partially causing these inconsistancies.