The Milwaukee Inventory for Styles of Trichotillomania-Child Version (MIST-C): initial development and psychometric properties.
The MIST-C gives you a two-minute kid survey that tells you which type of hair pulling to treat.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fullana et al. (2007) built the first kid-friendly checklist for hair-pulling styles.
They asked children with trichotillomania to rate how they pull.
Exploratory factor analysis found two clear types: focused pulling and automatic pulling.
What they found
The two-factor MIST-C came out clean.
Reliability and validity numbers looked good.
Clinicians now have a quick scale that separates planned pulling from habit-style pulling.
How this fits with other research
Goodwin et al. (2012) and Huang et al. (2014) used the same factor-analytic recipe to validate the ToMI and CFMQ.
All three studies show EFA can turn parent or child reports into solid clinical tools.
Plant et al. (2007) looked at adult TTM and found experiential avoidance drives severity.
Taken together, you first give the MIST-C to see the style, then target avoidance skills if the child scores high on focused pulling.
Why it matters
You can now sort pulling style in under five minutes.
Match the style to the treatment: habit reversal for automatic pulling, acceptance plus habit reversal for focused pulling.
Use the scale each month to track which style is fading and adjust your plan.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article describes the development and initial psychometric properties of the Milwaukee Inventory for Styles of Trichotillomania-Child Version (MIST-C), a self-report scale designed to assess styles of hair pulling in children and adolescents diagnosed with trichotillomania (TTM). Using Internet sampling procedures, the authors recruited 164 parent-child dyads, the children of whom met modified diagnostic criteria for TTM. The MIST-C was administered in the context of a larger survey examining functional impairment experienced by children with TTM. Results of an exploratory factor analysis on MIST-C items revealed a two-factor solution. Factors 1 ("focused" pulling scale) and 2 ("automatic" pulling scale) consisted of 21 and 4 items, respectively, with both scales demonstrating acceptable internal consistency and good construct and discriminant validity. The development of the MIST-C provides researchers with a reliable and valid assessment of "automatic" and "focused" pulling, and provides a means by which to examine the developmental trajectory and treatment implications of these pulling styles.
Behavior modification, 2007 · doi:10.1177/0145445507302521