The reliability and validity of Turkish version of The Night Eating Questionnaire in psychiatric outpatient population

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of Turkish version of the Night Eating Questionnaire (NEQ) in psychiatric outpatient population as a measure of severity of the Night Eating Syndrome (NES). Methods: We examined the factor structure, internal consistency and validity of the NEQ in Turkish. First, we translated NEQ into Turkish; and then back-translation into English; correction and semantic adaptation and assessment of the understanding of the questionnaire. We made the diagnosis of NES according to psychiatric examination. We administered the NEQ in 433 patients and the re-test in 141 participants two weeks later. Result: The instrument showed satisfactory internal consistency with an overall Cronbach α of 0.69. Intraclass correlation for the test re-test total score was 0.96. The ninety seven patients had NES with psychiatric examination. The area under ROC curve defined as 0,904. For cut-off point of 18 in NEQ both sensitivity and specificity were 90.7% and 73.8%. The confirmatory factor analysis of the NEQ yielded a similar four factor solution as the original scale. Conclusions: We found that Turkish version of NEQ is valid and has well diagnostically performance, and high internal consistency.