EATING DISORDER INVENTORY-2 - VALIDATION OF A GERMAN-LANGUAGE VERSIONWITH NORMS FOR MALE AND FEMALE ADOLESCENTS

The EDI-2 (Garner 1991) is the revised version of the Eating Disorder Inventory (Garner & Olmsted 1984) including three additional scales (A sceticism, Impulse Regulation, and Social Insecurity) with 27 items. A German version is now presented alongside normative and reliability d ata derived from a consecutive adolescent anorexia nervosa sample (n = 40) and a population based Austrian control sample of 1660 subjects ( 1080 girls, 580 boys aged 10-20 years). All scales except maturity fea rs showed significant differences between patients, female, and male c omparisons. Norms for Austrian female and male adolescents in three di fferent age groups (10-13, 13-16, and 16-20 years) are presented. Thei r similarity to US norms underlines the globalization of these constru cts in adolescents. Most scales were weight and/or age dependent. In f emales, bulimia, drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and ineffec tivity subscale scores increase with weight. Maturity fears, ineffecti vity, social insecurity, and asceticism decrease with age, whereas bod y dissatisfaction increases. Drive for thinness in the youngest female age group was as high as in the older ones. Although item analysis sh owed satisfactory reliability and inter-item correlations of most of t he items for all scales except asceticism, the addition of the three n ew scares did not enhance reliability of the test. Thus, when brevity of screening instrument is important, we recommend that only the eight original scales are used.