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Youth Experience Tracker

ABOUT THE YETI 

The Youth Experience Tracker (YETI) is a brief self-report measure of psychopathology for children, adolescents and young adults.

 

It covers domains that are relevant to the long-term risk of depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis:

  • affective lability

  • anxiety

  • depressive symptom

  • sleep

  • psychotic symptoms

  • basic symptoms

 

For each domain we included the minimum number of items necessary to capture the core concept. The YETI has 26 items with four response options each and one additional text item allowing youth to report any other experience.

YETI is presented on a single page. Most children and youth complete it within five minutes. For independent completion, a 4th-grade reading level is required.

REQUIREMENTS FOR COMPLETION 

YETI is designed to be used from age 9 to age 24. Children as young as 8 and young adults up to 27 years old have completed YETI in the validation study and provided good quality data, but some 8 years old may have difficulty understanding some items.

AGE RANGE

YETI asks youth to rate their experiences over the last one week (7 days).

REPORTING WINDOW

USE OF THE YETI

YETI is free for use in clinical and research applications under these conditions:

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  1. Use YETI as provided. Do not modify wording, response option, timescale or layout.
     

  2. Reference the YETI validation article. 

    Patterson VC, Pencer A, Pavlova B, Awadia A, MacKenzie LE, Zwicker A, Drobinin V, Howes Vallis E, Uher R (2021) Youth Experience Tracker Instrument: A self-report measure of developmental antecedents to severe mental illness. Early Intervention in Psychiatry, 15(3):676-685.

    doi: 10.1111/eip.13007 |  PMID: 32575146.

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You can download the YETI here.

Scoring Details 

Scoring:  Assign each response option values as follows:

 

‘Never’ = 0; ‘Once or twice’ = 1; ‘Often’ = 2; ‘Every day or all the time’ = 3

 

YETI total score is the sum of all 26 items. There are no reversed items. YETI total score 8 or above indicates increased risk for major mood or psychotic disorders.

 

YETI domain scores can be used as follows (items are numbered consecutively):
 

  • Affective lability. Sum items 3, 6, 8, 11, 15, 18. Domain score 4 or higher indicates affective lability.

  • Anxiety. Sum items 1, 5, 7, 10, 13. Domain score 3 or higher indicates anxiety.

  • Depressive symptoms. Sum items 2, 4, 9, 12, 14. Domain score 3 or higher indicates significant depressive symptoms.

  • Sleep (insomnia). Sum items 16, 17 (Two items only) Domain score 3 or higher indicates insomnia.

  • Psychotic symptoms. Sum items 19, 29, 21, 22. Domain score of 1 or higher indicates psychotic symptoms or psychotic-like experiences.

  • Basic symptoms . Sum items 23, 24, 25, 26. Domain score of 1 or higher indicates basic symptoms.

 

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Validity

YETI provides information that is comparable with much longer instruments designed for each of the six domains of psychopathology. The one exception is the basic symptoms subscale that has lower agreement with established interview-based measures in children. All six domains have strong concurrent validity in the adolescents and young adults. For more details, please see the YETI validation article. 

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YETI has been developed and validated in English. We have completed professional translations to additional 10 languages. If you are interested in translating YETI to other languages, please contact us. The translations should follow a rigorous process with forward and back-translation to obtain a translation that is suitable for a given population and accurately reflects the original version.

The YETI is being used in FORBOW , the Danish VIA project, and Kickstand Alberta. 

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