The Arabic Version of Compulsive Exercise Test among Saudi Population; Translation and Validation

Compulsive exercise is a condition characterized by uncontrollable exercise behaviour that may lead to severe and harmful physical and psychological consequences. Indeed, compulsive exercise is among the early symptoms of eating disorders that may affect different age groups. Globally and among Arab countries, compulsive exercise is common, while the screening methods used to assess compulsive exercise are limited. Thus, the Compulsive Exercise Test (CET) has emerged as a tool to assess cognitive, behavioural, and emotional factors related to compulsive exercise. The CET is a self-report, Likert-type scale comprising five distinct subscales. The increase in the CET scores is more likely associated with worsened pathology. Since the Arab countries lack such an assessment tool, we aimed to translate the CET into Arabic, validate the translated version, confirm the factor structures, and assess the internal consistency of the different subscales. Herein, we used the forward-backward translation method as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). The overall validity index of the translated version showed a score higher than 0.78, while the scale-level content validity index based on the average calculating method (S-CVI/Ave) and the agreement method (S-CVI/UA) were 0.91 and 0.58, respectively. Moreover, we recruited 399 Arabs living in Saudi to measure the internal consistency, and the value of the substantive internal consistency with Cronbach's α was 0.81. Subsequently, four of the Arabic-CET subscales had substantive internal consistency with Cronbach's α values higher than or equal to 0.70. Furthermore, the exploratory factor analysis results supported the substantial use of the five-subscale model. Taken together, our study supports using the Arabic-CET version to measure exercise compulsiveness among Arabs.