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New Horizons in Measurement: a Review of Novel and Innovative Approaches to Eating-Disorder Assessment

  • Eating Disorders (S Wonderlich and JM Lavender, Section Editors)
  • Published:
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Abstract

Purpose of Review

Eating disorders are serious mental-health concerns that will affect over 30 million individuals in the USA at some point in their lives. Eating disorders occur across the lifespan, in a variety of ethnicities and races, in both men and women, and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Given the prevalence and severity of eating disorders, it is important that clinicians and researchers have access to appropriate assessment tools to aid in the early identification and treatment referral, differential diagnosis, treatment planning, and progress monitoring, and to ensure valid research findings. In this review, we describe novel and innovative assessment tools that were developed within the past 5 years for utilization in research and/or clinical practice with individuals with eating disorders.

Recent Findings

We identified six multidimensional assessments for eating disorders, all of which can be administered online (with some also offering paper-and-pencil versions). Strengths of the measures included good internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent validity. However, in part, due to problematic scale construction methods, certain scales had poor discriminant validity and most were developed and validated in mostly female samples.

Summary

There are promising new eating disorder measures from which to choose; however, many measures continue to be limited by poor discriminant validity and need additional validation prior to incorporation into routine research and clinical practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Fraser Hall, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Kelsie T. Forbush, Danielle A. N. Chapa, Brittany K. Bohrer, Kelsey E. Hagan, Kelsey E. Clark, Daria A. Sorokina & Victoria L. Perko

  2. Children’s Mercy Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, USA

    Sara R. Gould

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  1. Kelsie T. Forbush
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Correspondence to Kelsie T. Forbush.

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Conflict of Interest

Kelsie T. Forbush receives commercially funded research grant monies to include a new version of the Eating Pathology Symptoms Inventory within the Recovery Record, Inc. mobile phone application. Dr. Forbush is the copyright holder and developer of the Eating Pathology Symptoms Inventory.

Sara R. Gould, Danielle A. N. Chapa, Brittany K. Bohrer, Kelsey E. Hagan, Kelsey E. Clark, Daria A. Sorokina, and Victoria L. Perko each declare no potential conflicts of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Eating Disorders

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Forbush, K.T., Gould, S.R., Chapa, D.A.N. et al. New Horizons in Measurement: a Review of Novel and Innovative Approaches to Eating-Disorder Assessment. Curr Psychiatry Rep 19, 76 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-017-0826-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-017-0826-2

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