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Eating Challenges in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Development and Validation of the “Aut-Eat” Questionnaire (AEQ)

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Abstract

The Aut-Eat Questionnaire (AEQ) provides a novel and comprehensive assessment of eating problems and patterns in children with ASD. To establish the internal consistency and discriminant validity of the AEQ, parents of children with ASD (n = 105, Mage = 40.85, SD = 15.67 months) or typical development (TD; n = 98, Mage = 50.33, SD = 16.50 months) completed the AEQ. Questionnaire construction, content validity, factor analysis, internal consistency and discriminant validity are reported. The AEQ was reliable with high internal consistency in most domains. Significant differences were found between groups in all domains. The AEQ is a reliable and valid tool and may help to characterize eating difficulties in this population.

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Notes

  1. Given that the tool is designed to be used on an ASD sample, only the ASD responses were used in the PAF-EFA analysis. Analysis on the full sample produced similar loadings (Appendix A).

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

EG Instructed the research, Created original AutEat questionnaire, Contributed to writing and editing of manuscript; RG Co-creator of original version AutEat with Eynat Gal and original study; DH Contributed to the writing, editing and review of the manuscript, and to the statistical analyses; SB Conducted the statistical analyses and contributed to the editing and review of the manuscript; REV Contributed to writing and editing of manuscript; OS Contributed to the improvement of the most recent revised version of AutEat and review of manuscript.

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Correspondence to Eynat Gal.

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Appendix A

Appendix A

See Table 5.

Table 5 Summary of principal axis factoring exploratory factor analysis for the AEQ on the combined sample (N = 196; Items a6 & c10 removed)

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Gal, E., Gal-Mishael, R., Vissoker, R.E. et al. Eating Challenges in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Development and Validation of the “Aut-Eat” Questionnaire (AEQ). J Autism Dev Disord 52, 811–822 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04978-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04978-x

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