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

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.