Comparability of the eating disorder inventory-2 between women and men

Researchers studying eating disorders in men often use eating-disorder risk and symptom measures that have been validated only on women. Using a sample of 215 college women and 214 college men, this article reports on the validity the Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2), one of the best-validated among women and the most widely used risk and symptom measure for women. The EDI-2 had the same, standard eight-factor structure for both genders, and tests of invariance showed that factor loadings, factor variances, and factor intercorrelations were equivalent across gender. The EDI-2 scales correlated with questionnaire measures of bulimic and anorexic symptomatology equivalently across gender. However, the EDI-2 scales were generally less reliable for men, leading to slightly lower Pearson-based estimates of correlations among the measures for men.