| Body Attitudes Test | |
| Purpose: | assessment of eating disorder |
The Body Attitudes Test (BAT) was developed by Probst et al. in 1995. It was designed for the assessment of multiple eating disorders in women. The BAT measures an individual's subjective body experience and attitudes towards one's own body. It is a questionnaire composed of twenty items which yields four different factors that evaluate the internal view of the patient's own body.
The BAT is used to evaluate self-reported outlooks women with eating disorders have pre-, during, and post-treatment. It has been proven to highlight the psychological changes experienced throughout the rehabilitation process and is a useful way to gauge adherence and success of treatment.[1]
This test also has the ability to differentiated between clinical and non-clinical subjects and between anorexics and bulimics. Studies have shown that patients with restrictive anorexia have lower BAT scores, whereas patients with bulimia nervosa score higher.
Michel Probst and colleagues began creating the BAT in 1984 and eventually published this questionnaire in 1995, with the goal of finding a new tool to evaluate how women with eating disorders view their own body. The BAT was originally written in Dutch and then translated to many languages.[2] This test was administered widely to both patients and control subjects, including women already diagnosed with eating disorders, women participating in Weight Watchers, and healthy women with no eating disorder diagnosis. To ensure the validity of this test, Probst and colleagues compared the results of the BAT to other tools already in use to evaluate women with eating disorders. These other evaluations include the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ), the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI), and the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT).[3]
The BAT is a self-reported questionnaire consisting of 20 questions. Patients are asked to score each statement 0–5, 0 meaning they do not relate to the statement at all, and 5 meaning the statement frequently describes their sentiment. The following are examples of questions asked in the assessment:[4]
The answers to these questions are then analyzed and provide information regarding four factors that evaluate the patient's subjective view on their body: