Validation of sociocultural attitudes towards appearance questionnaire and its associations with body-related outcomes and eating disorders among Chinese adolescents

The Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-4 Revised (SATAQ-4R) has been widely used in Western countries to link body appearance that is related to eating disorders and body dissatisfaction being commonly reported by adolescents. However, a comprehensive psychometric validation of the SATAQ-4R in Chinese adolescent samples is still lacking. To this end, the aim of the current study was to validate the gender-appropriate SATAQ-4R in a sample of Chinese adolescents, following by an investigation of its associations with body-related outcomes and eating disorder symptoms. Two gender-specific studies were conducted to examine the psychometric properties of the SATAQ-4R-Female and SATAQ-4R-Male respectively among adolescent girls (Study1, =344, with 73 participants at retest) and boys (Study2, =335, with 64 participants at retest). Confirmatory factor analysis was employed to examine the factor structure and their test-retest reliability, the internal consistency and convergent validity were subsequently examined. For the SATAQ-4R-Females, the seven-factor model has a reasonable fit, with Chi-square =1112.769 ( < 0.001), CFI = 0.91, RMSEA = 0.071, SRMR = 0.067. For the SATAR-4R-Males, an acceptable seven-factor model with Chi-square = 982.92 (