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introduction, validation, and use of the duke-Vanderbilt misophonia screening questionnaire (DVMSQ)

In a 2022 study, Williams et al. introduced and psychometrically validated the duke-Vanderbilt misophonia screening questionnaire (DVMSQ), a criterion-based misophonia screening questionnaire, using bifactor IRT modeling in general-population and autistic adult samples. They found that 17 of 20 items fit a bifactor structure with one general misophonia factor and four specific factors, the measure was highly reliable and approximately measurement-invariant across demographic and diagnostic subgroups, and DVMSQ scores converged strongly with another misophonia measure while showing modest discriminant validity relative to hyperacusis and phonophobia measures. From this they concluded that the DVMSQ represents a promising screening and severity-quantification tool for misophonia in both autistic and non-autistic adults, and that it constitutes the first operationalization of the misophonia consensus definition into a formal diagnostic algorithm (Williams et al., 2022).