An Analysis of the dutch eating behavior questionnaire and its correlation with neurotic personality traits

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is an increasing emphasis on eating disorders in the area of both clinical psychology and psychiatry and the ways of explaining the cause/ aetiology, symptamotology as well as the effort for finding efficient treatment techniques. The general point of view is that eating disorders exist along a continuum, where clinical populations are on one extreme and the restrained normal weight people are on the other. The main purpose of this present study was to test the applicability of one of the assessment procedures the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) in a Turkish sample. The other aim was to find out if there was any correlation between different eating styles and personality traits by using Neuroticism Scale Questionnaire together with DEBQ. Second step was the main study which tested the original factor structure of DEBQ. 250 subjects were chosen from the students of the Turkish-American Association. The reliability coefficient was significant and the factor analysis showed that the same factors were operating in the Turkish sample, although there were some differences between the subscales of the questionnaire. When total NSQ score and the scalescores of DEBQ were correlated, it was observed that only the restrained eating scale was significantly correlated with total NSQ score. According to this result, it can be suggested that restrained eaters were more prone to have neurotic tendecy than emotional and external eaters. The last step was the analysis of variance. The results failed to show any significant main or interaction effect of sex age and weight on either external or emotional eating scores. On the other hand sex had a main effect, and sex and weight had an interaction effect on restrained eating scores. The results were interpreted and discussed together with the methodological shortcomings and suggestions for future research. -VI-