Validation of a single session measure (Session Wants And Needs Outcome Measure)
Kooth Children and Young people (CYP) has been providing online single-session counselling support to young people since 2004. In order to better identify the aims of young people using the Kooth platform, Kooth CYP developed the Session Wants And Needs Outcome Measure (SWAN-OM), a single session measure comprising 21 items. The aim of the measure is to track important areas of change, as indicated by young people, following a single session text-based chat contact.
We are collaborating with Kooth on this project, to provide initial evidence regarding the psychometric properties of the SWAN-OM. This project consists of two phases of data collection (1. internally at Kooth, and 2. with collaborating services), and we are leading on the analysis to explore for example, how young people respond to the measure, the usability of the measure as well as emerging preferences regarding individual items, and whether these preferences could be predicted by young people’s demographic characteristics, and comparisons between the SWAN-OM and related measures that have been validated in previous research studies.
We reported our findings and recommendations to Kooth for Phase 1 in summer 2021. The journal publication can be found here.
We reported our findings from Phase 2 to Kooth at the end of 2022.