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The present study examines the principal components structure of the Bulimia Test, developed originally with college women. In the present study, college women and junior high school and high school student samples from a rural catchment area were included. Overall, results suggest a high level of congruence, with good replication of factors across samples. The exception was the basic concept of binging. follow-up interviews of adolescent subjects suggested that younger women may often misconstrue the meaning of important inventory items, e.g., that the term binge pertains to simple overeating. Thus, such subjects are prone to overacknowledge symptoms and thereby erroneously inflate prevalence estimates. The implications are that the validity of the binge factor of the original Bulimia Test may be questionable for younger subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most frequently used measure of dietary restraint in controlled experiments involving arduous dieters is the Revised Restraint Scale (Herman & Mack, 1975). To date, researchers who have used the measure in controlled experiments have created a "high" versus "low" artificial dichotomy based on a median split of scores on the scale, apparently in an attempt to apply a standard analysis of variance model. The present study replicates a basic ice cream taste test experiment. It compares study results that emerge from using the Revised Restraint Scale as an artificial dichotomy ("factor") versus a continuous independent variable in a general linear model. Results showed that an important joint effect emerged when restraint was treated as a continuous variable, which would likely have gone undetected using standard ANOVA, and that a greater proportion of variance could be accounted for in the continuous variable model. Researchers to date may have failed to optimally outline the nature of the relationship between dietary restraint and other variables that have been of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reviews some of the historical references to the concept of bulimia found in the medical literature of the last 300 years. Bulimia is an eating disorder that is widely believed to be of very recent, historical origin. The current diagnostic category of bulimia may be denoted as ‘new’, largely because of increased prevalence, and changes that have occurred in symptoms seen as constituting the syndrome. However, available references show clearly that various conceptualizations of bulimia extend back several hundred years. Also, treatment approaches that are consistent with presumed etiology have been offered by several early writers. While bulimia has recently been viewed as an emergent variant of anorexia nervosa, historical evidence suggests that earlier conceptualizations of the term describe a symptom as well as a discrete syndrome. Despite the fact that the diagnosis and use of concept of bulimia has been variable historically, its dramatic fundamental feature has remained consistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]