Sarah Enouy
Ph.D. Student
Key words: appearance overvaluation, eating disorders, specification curve analysis
The sociocultural and cognitive-behavioural theories of eating disorders are two of the most widely used theories to explain the development and maintenance of disordered eating. In my thesis, I am using specification curve analysis to examine the strength of the relation between appearance overvaluation (the core psychopathology of eating disorders from a cognitive-behavioural perspective) and disordered eating behaviours under different theoretical specifications that cross cognitive-behavioural and sociocultural theories of eating disorders. Doing so will enable me to examine the robustness of the relation between appearance overvaluation and disordered eating after taking into account all possible combinations of predictors based on the cognitive behavioural and sociocultural theories. Moreover, in the specification curve analysis, I will examine whether treating participants’ responses to questionnaire items that assess disordered eating behaviours as continuous or semi-continuous in analyses affect the relation between appearance overvaluation and disordered eating.