Exactly one month on from my last post here, I think that’s a first. I will keep this short but I am happy to share the first example of a genuinely useful CORE shiny app: https://shiny.psyctc.org/apps/YP-CORE_2_scores/.
This allows you to upload a spreadsheet of data of up to two completions of the YP-CORE (the adolescent self-report measure) per person and it does the mapping from the person’s age and gender (binary only for now) to the appropriate CSC (Clinically Significant Change) and RCI (Reliable Change Index) criteria for each person. There are example spreadsheets (Libre/OpenOffice ods, Excel xlsx and CSV formats) with artificial data so you can play with the app before trying your own data in it.
The CSC and RCI data for the UK are from the earlier (Twigg et al., 2016) data but these should probably be replaced by the values from the much larger and more fine grained datasets from Dr. Emily Blackshaw’s PhD work (submission upcoming) which are from both the UK and Ireland. In addition there are the criteria for Italy from Di Biase et al., 2019.
In addition to mapping the data to the appropriate cutting points the app supports data checking on top of the simple checking that the ods and xlsx spreadsheets offer and data with errors and the fully mapped data can be downloaded easily.
Moving on from data cleaning and mapping the app also offers a fair spread of analyses of the data and graphs including two cat’s cradle plots and the Jacobson plot as well as this plot:
That screengrab shows the tooltip that allows you to hover over a point and learn more about it.
There is an extensive introduction page that explains how to upload your data and use the app at: https://shiny.psyctc.org/apps/YP-CORE_2_scores/howto.html.
I have started with an app for simple first/last scores to make my programming challenge a bit easier but I also started with the YP-CORE because, unlike the situation using scores from the adult measures, you really do need to take age and gender into account when interpreting scores and that is tedious to do manually but the sort of thing that computers do well for us. Another YP-CORE allowing many scores per person rather than just two and then apps for the adult CORE measures will follow so that I hope to have a full suite of genuinely useful shiny apps for CORE up by the end of the year. Meanwhile, do play with the artificial data in the example spreadsheets for this app and, if you are using the YP-CORE, do use it to analyse your own data.
Very best wishes to all,
Chris
Sent 12/7/2025. Text and header image (Veit Stoss altarpiece in Kraków) both by CE and licensed under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
