Efficacy of a Contextualized Measurement of Life Satisfaction: A Pilot Study on the Assessment of Progress in Eating Disorder Therapy

Maria Aymerich, Antoni Castelló and Ramon Cladellas ()
Additional contact information
Maria Aymerich: Institute of Research on Quality of Life, University of Girona, 17004 Girona, Spain
Antoni Castelló: Department of Basic, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, 08193 Barcelona, Spain
Ramon Cladellas: Department of Basic, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, 08193 Barcelona, Spain

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 21, 1-14

Abstract: Eating disorders strongly affect psychological distress and its perception. However, most of the existing instruments for assessing life satisfaction rely on a point-estimation method that is biased due to the circumstantial conditions around the time of assessment. The main goal of this study was to apply a different kind of instrument—the Life Satisfaction Chart—that situates the current state of life satisfaction in the context of personal history and describes the life stages through a graph. The assessment was applied to a sample of 29 adolescent women (average age of 17.88) who were enrolled in a clinical program to treat their eating disorders. The results showed that their estimation of their current life satisfaction was almost identical to the estimation provided by a therapist for those who were in therapy phases 1, 2, and 3 (of four), while patients’ point-estimation satisfaction showed statistically significant differences when compared with the situated estimations. In therapy phase 4, significant discrepancies were observed between the therapist’s perception and the patients’ perception, because the therapist focused only on eating disorder recovery, whilst the patients evaluated their lives under almost-normal conditions, taking into account further dimensions. The Life Satisfaction Chart is a new approach to life-satisfaction measurement that showed promising measurement and therapeutical properties.

Keywords: eating disorders; validation; assessment; life satisfaction; adolescent; women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/21/14452/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/21/14452/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:21:p:14452-:d:963123

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().