Checking the scales: A psychometric evaluation of the Weight Concerns Scale in a sample of college-aged cisgender men from the United States.

Abstract

Historically, western societies have considered body image issues to predominantly affect young, White women. While in recent years men’s body image issues have been increasingly highlighted by researchers and the media alike, many instruments currently used to identify clinically significant body image disturbances were developed and validated with samples solely of women and/or girls. One such measure, Killen et al.’s (1994) Weight Concerns Scale (WCS), was initially validated in a sample of adolescent girls. The WCS has yet to be validated in samples of men, despite being used in large national surveys of college men and women (e.g., the Healthy Minds Study; HMS) used to inform resources on college campuses. Accordingly, we used structural equation modeling to conduct invariance testing between college student cisgender men’s (n = 2,248) and women’s (n = 4,733) responses on the WCS via the HMS. Through the use of two different approaches of invariance testing, evidence for metric noninvariance of two of the five items was identified, and all five items evidenced a response pattern that favored women over men. Additionally, removing noninvariant items on the WCS impacted the moderating effect of gender with indicators of depression, anxiety, and eating disorder symptomology. These findings suggest that the use of the WCS may not be appropriate for use in a cis-male sample without modification.

Unraveling the role of social support in eating behavior among children and adolescents in Shanghai, China: exploring the mediating role of self-efficacy and the moderating influence of BMI and weight concern

“…Body weight concern was assessed using The Weight Concerns Scale (WCS) ( 25 ), a valid measure consisting of five items rated on a Likert-type scale ranging from 4 to 7 points ( 26 ). This scale was developed based on the observed strong association between eating disorder symptoms and concerns related to body weight, with higher scores indicating greater weight concerns.…”

COVID-19 and Changes in Young Adults' Weight Concerns

“…In further support of our approach, the measure of weight concerns we utilized has been validated against clinical measures (e.g., future incidence of an eating disorder, Killen et al, 1996). Still, we acknowledge that our study's measure does not account for contemporary changes in men's body image issues in recent years (Brasil et al, 2023;Seekis et al, 2021).…”