Psychometric Network Analysis of the Intuitive Eating Scale-2 in Chinese General Adults

Intuitive Eating Scale-2 (IES-2) is a measurement of intuitive eating behaviors and has been validated, with traditional latent variable approaches, in youth and adults from a number of different populations, including college students in China. However, there still lacks the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the IES-2 in adults from the Chinese general population. Moreover, psychometric network analysis, as a complement to traditional latent variable approaches, has not been used for examining the psychometric properties of the IES-2. Thus, the present study aimed to use a psychometric network approach to evaluate the psychometric properties of the IES-2 in Chinese adults from the general population. A sample of 700 Chinese general adults (50% women; M age = 31.13 years, SD = 9.19) were included in the present study. Psychometric network analysis was performed by using EGAnet and psychonetrics packages on R 4.2.0. Exploratory graph analysis (EGA) identified four dimensions, which were well-separated in the estimated network. The network structure showed excellent stability and metric measurement invariance (i.e., network loadings) across men and women. Furthermore, several items in the IES-2 were identified as key nodes in the network of the IES-2 that may be important for the developement and maintenance of intuitive eating. For example, two items related to reliance on body cues were the most impactful nodes in the complete network. The findings of our study provide further understandings of the IES-2 from the perspective of network analysis and have implications for related applications of intuitive eating interventions for general populations.