Normative and psychometric data from the body image assessment - Revised in a population of french-speaking women

Abstract

This article concerns the creation of norms and the validation in French of the Body Image Assessment - Revised (BIA-R; Beebe, Holmbeck, & Grzeskiewicz, 1999). The sample comprised 100 normal female subjects. They completed questionnaires assessing body experience, eating pathology, psychological functioning, general perception and the BIA-R (Beebe et al., 1999). This test consists of nine silhouettes from which the subject has to choose the somatotype corresponding to her actual shape (cognitive response), the way she feels (affective response) and the way she would like to look (optative response). The results show a good concurrent validity for the cognitive and affective indices and the affective/ cognitive vs. optative divergences. On the other hand, we were not able to demonstrate such validity for the optative index and the affective vs. cognitive divergence index.