Eating attitude test factors in an unselected undergraduate population

✍ Scribed by Smead, Valerie S. ;Richert, Alphons J.

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 304 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0276-3478
• DOI: 10.1002/1098-108x(199003)9:2<211::aid-eat2260090211>3.0.co;2-t

✦ Synopsis

The Eating Attitudes Test (EAT) was given to 3 10 male and 302 female undergraduate volunteers who represented a cross section of students enrolled at a regional university. The responses of the 6 72 subjects to the EAT items were factor-analyzed separately by sex using a principal components procedure and a varimax rotation. Both males and females produced a six-factor structure which accounted for ap- proximately 40% of the variance (39.8% males, 42.4% females). Three factors were common to the sexes, and each sex produced three sex-specific factors. The implications of these findings for the use of the EAT scale as a measure of attitudes toward food and eating in a nonanorexic population are discussed.

The Eating Attitudes Test (EAT) of Garner and Garfinkel (1979) was developed and validated to discriminate anorexics from normals. Further, the factor analysis of the EAT by Garner, Olmsted, Bohr, and Garfinkel (1982) used 160 anorexic, female subjects. However, the EAT is being used with increasing frequency in research on eating attitudes in nonclinical populations (e.g., But-