Ethanolamine as a potential biomarker and therapeutic target for depressive disorder.

The reliability, validity, and generalizability of psychological measures have been increasingly questioned (Flake and Fried ), including commonly used eating disorder instruments such as the Eating Disorder Examination‐Questionnaire (EDE‐Q; Fairburn and Beglin , ; see Jenkins and Rienecke ). The EDE‐Q was developed as a self‐report version of the Eating Disorder Examination (EDE; Fairburn et al. ) and is arguably the most widely used self‐report measure of eating pathology. Despite this, concerns remain regarding the reliability and validity of the original proposed four‐factor structure of the EDE‐Q (Dietary Restraint, Eating Concern, Shape Concern, and Weight Concern) Jenkins and Rienecke () that is derived from the 22 “attitudinal” items (i.e., not the behavioral frequency items). Many researchers and clinicians continue to use the EDE‐Q with its original four‐factor structure, including by reporting norms at the population level and within treatment studies (e.g., Hilbert et al. ; Karapatsia et al. ; Rienecke et al. ), even though there is severely limited psychometric support (Jenkins and Rienecke ). This is problematic because an unstable factor structure may misclassify eating psychopathology or mischaracterize treatment outcomes. As such, use of the EDE‐Q must be part of ongoing discussions about defining and measuring with accuracy what is being studied in psychological science to increase confidence in study conclusions (Flake and Fried ; Jenkins and Rienecke ). To address ongoing concerns about self‐report psychological instruments, primarily quantitative methods have assessed structural validity across samples (Flake and Fried ; Jenkins and Rienecke ). Emerging qualitative research methods can complement this work by investigating how participants understand assessment items, their nuanced reasons for selecting Likert responses, and whether these reasons align with what the item and its overarching factor intend to measure (Lundmann and Villadsen ; Mason et al. ). For example, in an investigation of cognitive processes when responding to a personality survey, qualitative analysis showed that items often did not correspond to anticipated factors, and participants varied significantly in interpreting items (Lundmann and Villadsen ). For example, participants often selected the same response (e.g., “disagree”) but described opposing experiences with different interpretations.