Concurrent Validity of the Adult Eating Behavior Questionnaire in a Canadian Sample

Tamara R Cohen; Lisa Kakinami; Hugues Plourde; Claudia Hunot-Alexander; Rebecca J Beeken

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.779041

Concurrent Validity of the Adult Eating Behavior Questionnaire in a Canadian Sample

Front Psychol. 2021 Dec 2:12:779041. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.779041. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Tamara R Cohen^{1

2}, Lisa Kakinami^{2

3}, Hugues Plourde⁴, Claudia Hunot-Alexander⁵, Rebecca J Beeken^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Land and Food Systems, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
² PERFORM Centre, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
³ Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
⁴ School of Human Nutrition, McGill University, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC, Canada.
⁵ Instituto de Nutrición Humana, Departamento de Reproducción Humana, Crecimiento y Desarrollo Infantil, Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico.
⁶ Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.
⁷ Department of Behavioural Science and Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom.

Abstract

The current study aimed to test the factor structure of the Adult Eating Behavior Questionnaire (AEBQ), its construct validity against the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ-R18) and its associations with body mass index (BMI) in Canadian adults (n = 534, 76% female). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) revealed that a seven-factor AEBQ model, with the Hunger subscale removed, had better fit statistics than the original eight-factor structure. Cronbach's alpha was used to assess the internal reliability of each subscale and resulted with α > 0.70 for all subscales except for Hunger (α = 0.68). Pearson's correlations were used to inform the convergent and discriminant validation of AEBQ against the TFEQ-R18 and to examine the relationship between AEBQ and BMI. All AEBQ Food Approach subscales positively correlated with that of the TFEQ-R18 Emotional Eating and Uncontrolled Eating subscales. Similarly, BMI correlated positively with Food Approach subscales (except Hunger) and negatively with Food Avoidance subscales (except Food Fussiness). These results support the use of a seven-factor AEBQ for adults self-reporting eating behaviors, construct validity of the AEBQ against TFEB-R18, and provide further evidence for the association of these traits with BMI.

Keywords: adult; appetitive traits; eating behaviours; obesity; overweight; psychometrics; questionnaire; validation.