Finding What You’re Looking For? Exploring the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire

If you’ve ever been assessed for an eating disorder in a clinical setting, there is a good chance you’ve completed the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q). The EDE–Q is a self-report questionnaire widely used in ED assessment and research. Clinicians and researchers calculate several different scores from patient or participant responses to the questionnaire:

  • A score on the global scale, which provides a measure of the severity of ED psychopathology
  • 4 sub-scales: eating restraint, eating concern, weight concern and shape concern

There are a number of cut-off scores that can be used to distinguish between clinically significant and non-significant cases. In this post, I will look at a few papers critiquing the use of the EDE-Q in clinical and research settings.

BACKGROUND

The EDE-Q was originally developed as an assessment tool for bulimia nervosa and binge eating and contains few, if any, questions that specifically assess anorexia nervosa symptomology. … Continue reading →

Living in Our Bodies: Embodiment, Eating Disorders and the IDEA Scale

A good deal of my time is devoted to reading articles about eating disorders, feminism, qualitative research, and embodiment. I don’t know if this makes me a very interesting person or a very boring one, but it certainly makes me a very opinionated one, especially about these topics. Lately, I’ve been exploring the literature around eating disorders and embodiment in particular, trying to get a sense of how researchers attend to “embodiment” in the development, course, and outcomes of eating disorders and recovery. Predictably, I have my own opinions about this relationship, but am of course interested in how other researchers have explored embodiment in the context of eating disorders.

In my research spiral to find relevant articles, I came across an article by Stanghellini et al. (2012), in which the authors look at how individuals with eating disorders experience their bodies. In the article, the authors discuss … Continue reading →