Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

Testing the Cross-Cultural Clinical Utility of the VMI for Palestinian, Israeli, and American Typically Developing Kindergarten Children

¹Department of Occupational Therapy, York College, The City University of New York, 94-20 Guy R. Brewer BLVD. Jamaica, New York ,USA

²Department of Occupational Therapy, Long Island University-Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York , USA

³Department of Psychology & Child Center, Al-Qudes University, Jerusalem, Israel

⁴Department of Occupational Therapy, Joint program, Faculty of Social Welfare & Health Sciences, University of Haifa and Technion, Haifa, 31905, Israel

*Corresponding Author:

Tamara Avi-Itzhak
Associate Program Director, Associate Professor
Department of Occupational Therapy, York College
The City University of New York
94-20 Guy R. Brewer BLVD. Jamaica, New York 11451, USA
Tel: 718-262-3761
Fax: 718-262-2767
E-mail: taviitzhak@york.cuny.edu

Received Date: March 31, 2014; Accepted Date: May 16, 2014; Published Date: May 22, 2014

Citation: Avi-Itzhak T, Obler DR, Abdallah TM, Engel-Yeger B, Josman N (2014) Testing the Cross-Cultural Clinical Utility of the VMI for Palestinian, Israeli, and American Typically Developing Kindergarten Children. J Child Adolesc Behav 2:136. doi:10.4172/2375-4494.1000136

Copyright: © 2014 Avi-Itzhak T, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Purpose: To assess the cross-cultural clinical utility of the Visual Motor Integration (VMI) standardized U.S. norms for typically developing Palestinian, Israeli, and American kindergarten children. The cross-cultural comparisons tested the extent to which the VMI standardized U.S. norms for all three tests (a) are appropriate for use with the aforementioned groups without the need for cross-cultural adaptations, and (b) have adequate rates of test sensitivity and specificity such that study classification results are comparable with those obtained using the VMI U.S. norms. Methods: The sample was comprised of 134 typically developing kindergarten children. Results: The observed mean performance scores were not significantly different from the published U.S. norms on all three tests for the Palestinian group and significantly higher for the Israeli group on all three tests. For the American group, scores were higher on the Visual Motor Integration and Visual Perception tests, but lower on the Motor Coordination test. The sensitivity rates for eight of the nine calculations resulted in perfect agreement between the study classification results and the VMI standardized classification of true positive cases. The specificity rates for the Palestinian group demonstrated perfect agreement between the study classification results and the VMI standardized U.S. norms. The specificity rates obtained for the Israeli and American groups were moderate. Conclusions: These exploratory findings merit additional research to further assess the clinical utility of employing the VMI U.S. norms with or without cross-cultural adaptations for these specific or any other cultural groups.

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