Resumen de Social and Body Self-Esteem in Adolescents with Eating Disorders

Josep Toro Trallero, Josefina Castro, Araceli Gila, María José Gómez

• The aim of the present study was to analyze social and body self-esteem in adolescents with eating disorders and to assess the psychometric properties of the SEED (Self-esteem in Eating Disorders), a self-report questionnaire designed specifically to evaluate these variables. The SEED was used to compare social and body self-esteem in 170 eating disorder adolescent patients, 115 with anorexia nervosa (mean age 15.6), 55 with bulimia nervosa (mean age 16.2) and 359 schoolgirls from the general population (mean age 14.9) The SEED demonstrated good internal consistency (Cronbach alpha for eating disordered patients= .94 and for general population= .87). One week test-retest reliability was also adequate both in eating disorder patients (r= .77) and in girls from the general population (r= .86). Factor analysis yielded two factors which explained the 59% of the variance. The difference between the mean scores of the girls from the general population and the anorexic patients on one hand and the bulimics on the other was statistically significant (p<.001). There were no statistically significant differences between anorexic and bulimic patients. The differences between both anorexic and bulimic patients and girls of the comparison group in the two factors obtained in the factor analysis were highly significant (p<.001). A cut-off point of 15 gave a sensitivity of 75.9% and a specificity of 86.6% in the classification of subjects as eating disorder patients or not. The SEED showed adequate internal and test-retest reliabilities. Eating disorder adolescent patients have lower social and body self-esteem than adolescents from the general population