The Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire

Brief Description of the Tool

The Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q; Fairburn & Belgin, 1994) is a 36 item, self-report measure of the core cognitive and behavioural features of eating disorders. It can be used in the diagnosis of Anorexia, Bulimia Nervosa and Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) (Allen, Byrne, Lampard, Watson, & Fursland, 2011). It can also be used to measure change in symptoms over the course of treatment. It is a parallel form of the Eating Disorders Examination (EDE; Fairburn & Cooper, 1993), a widely used semi-structured interview of eating disorder psychopathology, providing a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to the interview.

Questions cover cognitive and behavioural symptoms over a 28-day span. Cognitive features are grouped into four distinct sub-scales: Restraint Eating Concern, Shape Concern and Weight Concern. The behavioural features are measured separately to this and cover behaviour such as frequency of binge episodes, laxative misuse, diuretic misuse, self-induced vomiting and excessive exercise.

Utility of the Tool

The EDE-Q is an efficient and cost-effective tool in the diagnosis of eating disorders in adults and adolescents.

Scoring. The four cognitive subscales (Restraint, Eating Concern, Weight Concern and Global EDE-Q) are rated on a 7-point scale, with higher scores indicating more psychopathology (Oyvind, Reas & Lask, 2010).

Questions addressing behavioural symptoms are scores individually and provide and indication of the presence and frequency of certain behaviours rather than a resulting number to be compared to a clinical cut off score.

Clinical Cut Offs. Clinical cu...

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...ure of questions asked, participants may underreport behavioural features (Binford et al., 2005). The EDE-Q provides a parallel version of the EDE interview, which addresses these limitations (Fairburn & Belgin, 1994)

Studies have found the EDE-Q to correlate well with other measures of eating disorders such as, daily food records, interviews, and ___ (reference). The EDE-Q is a well validated, reliable, and economically efficient alternative to similar tools.

Parameters and Limitations of the EDE-Q

Limitations of the EDE-Q primarily centre on the lack of research for its use in males and adolescents, in comparison to norms available for young adult females. However these limitations are being addressed in more recent research, which is providing normative data in a broader range of clinical and nonclinical populations (Mond et al., 2006; Lavendar et al, 2010).