Development of a Tic Screener: The Motor or Vocal Inventory of Tics (MOVeIT-14)

ABSTRACT

This study describes the development and preliminary testing of the Motor or Vocal Inventory of Tics (MOVeIT), a tic symptom screener. Scale items were reviewed by 15 subject matter experts and tested with 2 pilot subject parent-child dyads. Subsequently, 80 children aged 4–17 years and their parents were recruited from a pediatric behavioral health clinic (N = 49) and a general pediatric clinic (N = 31). Parents and youth aged 8 years and older completed the screener. An expert clinician diagnostic interview and the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale served as the gold standard for comparison. Using a MOVeIT-14 Parent Report cutoff of 10, 83.3% of youth were correctly classified (90% sensitivity, 81% specificity). For the youth report, the optimal cutoff was 12 (74% sensitivity, 83% specificity, 61.5% correctly classified). Parent-youth agreement was strong (r = .74), and reliability was 0.98 and 0.95 for parent and youth reports respectively. Results suggest that a 14-item version (the MOVeIT-14) may accurately identify tic disorders with low rates of false negatives, especially using parent report.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Contract 200-2015-M-63130.