The validity of the eating disorder examination and its subscales

The EDE is a semistructured interview which has been developed as a measure of the specific psychopathology of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. To establish its discriminant validity it was administered to 100 patients with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa and to 42 controls. The two groups differed significantly on all items. Five subscales were derived on rational grounds and evaluated on the two populations. The alpha coefficients for each subscale indicated a satisfactory degree of internal consistency. The EDE provides clinicians and research workers with a detailed and comprehensive profile of the psychopathological features of patients with eating disorders.