Development of new psychometric instruments to measure appearance distress during adolescence: the Adolescent Appearance Distress Scales
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology, Statistics
- Keywords
- adolescent, appearance, self-conscious, scale, measurement, psychometric, questionnaire
- Copyright
- © 2014 Moss et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Development of new psychometric instruments to measure appearance distress during adolescence: the Adolescent Appearance Distress Scales. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e575v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.575v1
Abstract
Measures of adolescent appearance distress have focused on weight and body shape, excluding other aspects of appearance. The absence of a psychometrically sound, general measure of appearance distress has limited evaluation of interventions and curtailed investigation of psychological processes in adolescent appearance adjustment. This paper describes the development of scales assessing adolescent appearance distress to address this dearth of appropriate measures, validated through cross-sectional design involving 617 adolescents. Two scales were developed, comprising 13 items for younger adolescents and 17 items for older adolescents. Two similar factors were generated for each scale, “fear of negative appearance evaluation” and “salience and investment in appearance.” A third factor was identified for older adolescents, “social appearance comparison.” Sound psychometric properties were demonstrated.
Author Comment
This paper will be submitted to PeerJ for review.