The Deliberate Denial of Disordered Eating Behaviors Scale: Development and Initial Validation in Young Women with Subcl
- PDF / 410,140 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 37 Downloads / 157 Views
The Deliberate Denial of Disordered Eating Behaviors Scale: Development and Initial Validation in Young Women with Subclinical Disordered Eating Lindsay M. Howard 1
&
Kristin E. Heron 1,2 & Robert J. Cramer 3
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The purpose of this study was to develop a self-report measure of deliberate denial of disordered eating behaviors (i.e., conscious omission, concealment, or misrepresentation of behavior related to an eating disorder). Study 1 involved item generation and review by focus groups composed of women with subclinical disordered eating (N = 13) and an expert panel of five eating disorder researchers and clinicians. In Study 2, the scale and validity measures were administered to 311 undergraduate women with subclinical disordered eating via an online survey. Initial items were refined based on focus group and expert panel feedback, resulting in an 18-item scale. In Study 2, a series of exploratory factor analyses were conducted, resulting in a 12item Deliberate Denial of Disordered Eating Behaviors scale (DDEBS-12) with a unidimensional total score. A parallel analysis confirmed the single-factor structure. In Study 3, a separate sample of 362 undergraduate women with subclinical disordered eating completed the DDEBS-12, and the factor structure was subsequently confirmed via a confirmatory factor analysis. The DDEBS-12 possessed excellent internal consistency, and was correlated as expected with measures of concealment, disordered eating, body dissatisfaction, disclosure, and social desirability, suggesting criterion, convergent, and discriminant validity. This novel scale can be used to examine the role of denial in the onset and maintenance of disordered eating behaviors, and address denial in the identification and prevention of disordered eating. Keywords Eating disorders . Disordered eating . Lying . Denial . Scale development
Secrecy about, and concealment of, eating behaviors are common in people with eating disorders. Retrospective surveys indicate that nearly three quarters of eating disorder patients deny that anything is wrong in the beginning months of their eating disorder, making denial particularly relevant to subclinical populations (Schoen et al. 2012). Denial can be categorized as either conscious or unconscious omissions, concealments, or misrepresentations of behaviors or internal experiences (Vitousek et al. 1991). Although assessing unintentional denial using a self-report measure is nearly impossible,
* Lindsay M. Howard [email protected] 1
The Virginia Consortium Program in Clinical Psychology, 555 Park Avenue, Norfolk, VA 23504, USA
2
Old Dominion University, 250 Mills Godwin Building, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA
3
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
deliberate denial may be measurable. Deliberate denial of disordered eating behaviors can be defined as any conscious omission, concealment, or misrepresentation of behavior related to disordered eating
Data Loading...
