Dietary Restraint: Restriction by Another Name?

Please excuse me while I nerd out all over your computer screen. I recently turned a corner on my appreciation of the value of quantitative social science, having taken a structural equation modelling class last winter, and today I’m going to share a little of that with you. While I’m still a qualitative researcher through and through, this course taught me that there is great value in understanding how scales are constructed and what that means about how we can interpret results from survey-takers.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with eating disorders? Plenty. A while back, Shiran wrote a post about the issues with the Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire. Her post didn’t focus on the scale psychometrics – that is, how well the scale measures what it is supposed to measure and how consistent it is – but still reveals how questionnaires used to … Continue reading →

Who’s Failing Whom? Treatment Retention for Eating Disorders

I find the idea of treatment retention for eating disorders to be quite interesting. Mostly, I find it intriguing to dissect the way that authors write about treatment retention – that is, how they tend to look at factors within people that make them more or less able to complete treatment, rather than things about the treatment that serve or don’t serve people’s needs. I’ve been reading a lot more about adolescent eating disorder treatment these days, given that I’m doing a practicum at an adolescent treatment centre that does things a bit differently. Resultantly, I’ve become more interested than ever in how we can better meet people’s different treatment needs and provide a more comprehensive treatment continuum.

The stark reality of treatment is that people don’t always finish it. That statement sounds fairly banal, but it’s a loaded one. Too often, I see this framed as people failing Continue reading →