title: The development of the Ben-Tovim Walker Body Attitudes Questionnaire (BAQ), a new measure of women's attitudes towards their own bodies.
abstract: A measure has been developed which assesses a broad range of attitudes which women hold towards their bodies. The Ben-Tovim Walker Body Attitudes Questionnaire (BAQ) is a 44-item self-report questionnaire whose subscales encompass six distinct aspects of body experience (feelings of overall fatness, self-disparagement, strength, salience of weight, feelings of attractiveness and consciousness of lower body fat). The development of the BAQ involved administering increasingly refined versions to a wide range of female respondents. The final version appears to have satisfactory psychometric properties. When the BAQ scores of 29 patients with anorexia nervosa were compared with those of a large community sample, a more complex pattern of deviant attitudes appeared than would previously have been suspected. The BAQ appears to have potential as a research instrument in this and other fields in which the measurement of attitudes towards the body is important.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Flinders Medical Centre, Bedford Park, Australia.
authors.forename: D I
authors.initials: DI
authors.lastname: Ben-Tovim
authors.forename: M K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Walker
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001828:Body Image; D015992:Body Mass Index; D001068:Feeding and Eating Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results