(P24-026-23) The Need for Cultural Adaptations to Disordered Eating Scales for Indigenous Women

Objectives: Inaccurate measurement of eating behaviors may result in biased health assessments of historically-marginalized populations, including Indigenous mothers. Therefore, we assessed the reliability, validity, and underlying factor structure of a risk eating behavior scale applied to Mexican Indigenous and Non-Indigenous adolescent mothers.

Methods: Secondary data analysis using a subset of women aged 13-20 years who had an infant aged 3-35 months at the time of interview (n=416) from the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey (2012). An eight-item eating disorders scale asked participants the extent to which they felt that they were in control of their weight and food intake behaviors. We assessed internal consistency of the scale and used exploratory factor analysis. All analyses were calculated for the overall sample and for a subset of women self-identified as Indigenous.

Results: Nearly one fourth of the women self-identified as Indigenous (n=103). Internal consistency was higher in the overall sample (Cronbach α=.68) than in the subset of Indigenous women (α=.58). One of the items was not relevant for Indigenous women, as none of them reported taking pills or other remedies to lose weight. For the overall sample, we identified a 3-factor solution which we labelled as: 1) self-control; 2) loss of control; and 3) harmful behaviors. When analyzed separately, however, the factor loadings for Indigenous women differed significantly, yielding a 2-factor solution that included only the first two labels.

Conclusions: The original scale did not seem to capture cross-cultural differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous mothers in Mexico; with more than 65 Indigenous groups in Mexico, caution is warranted when generalizing results to culturally diverse groups. These findings have policy and practice implications about improving the availability of valid and culturally congruent eating disorders’ measures.

Funding Sources: No funding