Saving inventory - Revised: Psychometric performance across the lifespan.

Background: The Saving Inventory - Revised (SI-R) is the most widely used self-report measure of hoarding symptom severity. The goal of this study is to establish a firm empirical basis for a cutoff score on the SI-R and to examine the functioning of the SI-R as a screening tool and indicator of hoarding symptom severity across the lifespan.

Methods: This study used archival data from 1,116 participants diagnosed with a clinical interview in 14 studies conducted by research groups who focus on hoarding. We used receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and the Youden's J statistic to determine optimal cutoff scores for classifying participants who would be likely to receive a hoarding diagnosis.

Results: Overall, the discriminant performance of the SI-R Total score and each of the three subscales was high, confirming the status of the SI-R is an excellent screening tool for differentiating hoarding from non-hoarding cases. The optimal SI-R Total cutoff score is 39, although analyses suggested that older adults require a significantly lower cutoff and adults younger than 40 years require a significantly higher cutoff score.

Limitations: The confidence interval around the optimal cutoff for the SI-R Total score for oldest age group was wide in comparison to those reported for the younger groups, creating more uncertainty around the optimal cutoff score for this group.

Conclusions: This paper provides investigators and clinicians with the data necessary to select evidence-based cutoff scores on the SI-R that optimally suit their relative need for sensitivity and specificity in different age groups.