Social acceptance of adolescents with Tourette syndrome

Sixty college students from two Biopsychology classes at Central Connecticut State University were presented with one of three scenarios. Scenario one described an adolescent with Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome (TS) with complex tics, in which he was making obscene gestures, yelling, and screaming out curses in the middle of class. Scenario two described an adolescent with TS with simple tics, in which he was tapping his foot and making loud honking sounds in the middle of class. Scenario three described an adolescent without TS, in which he was not portraying a motor movement or a vocal sound. Students responded to 11 statements designed to measure social acceptance on a five-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. These statements referred to social and academic situations that the average college student would experience daily. Each scenario was distributed to 20 students. This study tests the hypothesis that adolescents with TS (complex tics) would have the lowest reported level of social acceptance, those without TS had the highest reported level of social acceptance, and those with TS (simple tics) to be at a mid-level of reported social acceptance. A between subjects One-Way Analysis of Variance revealed a significant difference in reported social acceptance among the three conditions. Subsequently, a Student Newman-Keuls multiple comparison test revealed that both the TS simple and TS complex groups had significantly lower social acceptance scores than the non-TS group, and that the TS simple and complex groups did not differ from one another