OBJECTIVE: To develop an effective measure of the symptoms of eating disorders for use in community surveys. METHOD: A branched eating disorders instrument for administration by notebook computer was evaluated as a screen in 487 teenage schoolgirls. High scorers and a stratified sample of low scorers were evaluated in a second-stage interview with the Eating Disorders Examination (EDE). RESULTS: The Branched Eating Disorders Test (BET) proved to have exceptional validity coefficients (sensitivity 100%, specificity 99%, positive predictive value 70%). DISCUSSION: This pilot validation suggests that the BET largely overcomes the problems of earlier instruments of limited screening utility when applied to community samples.
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Selzer et al. (1996) studied this question.