Development of a new Japanese version of the Clinical Impairment Assessment Questionnaire

BACKGROUND: The Clinical Impairment Assessment questionnaire (CIA) is used to measure the severity of psychosocial impairment in patients with eating disorders. The purpose of the present study was to develop a new Japanese version of the CIA (CIA-J) and to evaluate its reliability and validity. METHODS: We translated the sixteen items of the CIA into Japanese, back-translated them into English, and had them verified by a native English speaking professional editor. Participants were 152 Japanese-speaking patients (30.4 ± 10.6 years) under treatment for eating disorders and 173 healthy controls (29.5 ± 8.3 years). In addition to the CIA-J, the participants were asked to answer the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT26), The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). We performed confirmatory factor analyses to evaluate the factor structure, calculated the Cronbach’s alphas of the CIA-J to assess the reliability, and calculated the correlation coefficients between the CIA-J score and those of EAT26, PANAS, and HADS to assess concurrent validity. We also used a Kruskal-Wallis test followed by Steel-Dwass test to compare the scores of the subtypes of eating disorders and the healthy control group. RESULTS: A three-factor structure was obtained, similar to the original version. The Cronbach’s alphas of both the global and subscale scores of the CIA-J were high. The CIA-J had significant positive correlations with the EAT26, the negative affect subscale of the PANAS, and the HADS. The global and subscale scores for all subtypes of eating disorders were significantly higher than those of the healthy control group. CONCLUSIONS: The CIA-J was determined to be reliable and valid for assessing the severity of psychosocial impairment in patients with eating disorders.