Validity studies of the eating disorder examination

TLDR

The Eating Disorder Examination (EDE) is a comprehensive clinical interview used to assess anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. This study is the first to evaluate the EDE’s concurrent validity by comparing it with other primarily behavioral measures of eating disorder symptoms. EDE reports were modestly correlated with daily caloric intake, meal avoidance, forbidden food avoidance, binge‑episode frequency and size, and strongly correlated with vomiting frequency, while body image disturbance scores were strongly linked to negative body‑image questionnaires and modestly to body‑size overestimation, yet the EDE body‑image scales did not show incremental discriminant validity over the Body Shape Questionnaire.

Abstract

The Eating Disorder Examination (EDE) is a comprehensive clinical interview for the assessment of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The present study is the first to examine its concurrent validity by comparing it against other, primarily behavioral, measures of eating disorder symptoms. Reports of eating behavior and attitudes on the EDE were associated modestly with daily caloric intake, avoidance of regular meals, avoidance of forbidden foods, frequency and size of binge-eating episodes, and associated highly with frequency of vomiting episodes as recorded on eating diaries. The EDE measures of body image disturbance were related strongly to self-report questionnaires of negative body image attitudes and related modestly to body size overestimation. However, there was no evidence for incremental discriminant validity of the EDE body image scales as compared with the Body Shape Questionnaire.