The children’s eating attitudes test: French validation of a short version

Abstract

Disordered eating attitudes and behaviors (DEAB) in childhood have been prospectively associated with eating disorders and obesity in adolescence. Therefore, evaluating DEAB in children with a reliable, sensitive and well-adapted scale is very important. The Children’s Eating Attitudes Test (ChEAT) is one of the most popular measuring tools for DEAB in children, but no French version is available. Moreover, while completion time is an important factor to be considered when working with children, only one recent study proposed a shorter version of the ChEAT. Taking the previous works of Murphy and colleagues (2019) as a starting point, the current study aimed to provide the first French-speaking validated 14-item short version of the ChEAT. A sample of 1092 boys and girls aged between 8 and 12 years old were recruited in two urban areas in the province of Quebec, Canada. They completed the ChEAT, and their height and weight were measured at school. Factorial structure and internal consistency were assessed. After the initial factorial analysis, two “vomiting (or purging)” items were yielded as problematic and were thus removed from the analysis. The remaining 12 items provided a good fit to the data and a good internal consistency. Moreover, the factorial structure was proved to be invariant across sexes. This study is the first to provide a French assessment of DEAB in elementary school children. The French short version of the ChEAT provided a quick and reliable assessment for DEAB with non-clinical children population and could be used as a screening tool, even though no cut-off was established yet. Cross-sectional, descriptive study, Level V.