NORMATIVE AND RELIABILITY DATA FOR 11-YEAR-OLDS TO 18-YEAR-OLDS ON THE EATING DISORDER INVENTORY

Although anorexia nervosa typically begins during adolescence with proneness to the disorder beginning even earlier, reliability and normative studies of the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) have relied primarily on college‐aged students. This problem was addressed by examining subscale performance of a normative sample of 619 boys and girls from 11 to 18 years of age who attended public school in Ontario, Canada. Analyses of the internal consistency of the EDI subscales Bulimia and Maturity Fears failed to demonstrate adequate reliability for either boys or girls. Perfectionism and Interpersonal Distrust subscales were also unreliable for the boys. Analysis of variance procedures revealed that girls scored higher than boys on Drive for Thinness, Body Dissatisfaction, and Interoceptive awareness. Older (14–18 years) girls differed from younger (11–13 years) girls, scoring higher on Body Dissatisfaction and lower on Interpersonal Distrust. Older and younger boys did not differ from each other on any of the EDI subscales, nor did they differ from the 14–18‐year‐old norms presented by Rosen, Silberg, and Gross (1988). Older girls, on the other hand, scored higher than the Rosen et al. norms on Drive for Thinness and Interoceptive Awareness. EDI percentile scores are presented for girls 11–13 and 14–18 years of age. Copyright © 1990 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company