Chapter 4 80 The research questions for this article were: 1) Do adult participants with emotional eating behaviour identify themselves with the situations as presented in the vignettes [50]? (2) Which coaching strategy – validating, focus-on-change, or dialectical – matches the needs of adults with emotional eating “when experiencing cravings”, and to what extent is that strategy perceived as helpful by the participants? And (3) Which coaching strategy – validating, focus-on-change, or dialectical – matches the needs of adults with emotional eating “following the eating”, and to what extent is that strategy perceived as helpful by the participants? Methods Design We presented participants with online vignettes containing lifelike scenarios of individuals with emotional eating [50], and invited them to preview the vignettes. Data were gathered by asking participants six questions about the scenarios in the vignettes. These questions offered both open-text and multiple-choice answer options (see Table 5 of Appendix). Participants’ personal eating style was assessed with the additionally filled in 33-item Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) [51]. This is a validated questionnaire with responses recorded on a 5-point Likert scale. Using vignettes is an unobtrusive way for participants to give their opinion about a situation because it is about fictional persons and situations. Participants do not have to reveal their own personal emotions or eating behaviour. Vignettes have been found to be efficient in finding out people’s opinions about scenarios and individuals [52-53]. The vignettes in this study described scenarios in the daily life of a person [54]: they contained a brief summing-up of the person’s demographic data such as name and age, followed by personal attributes like work and hobbies. The vignette also described the emotional state of the personas. The condition in the first vignette was about experiencing cravings and the urge to emotional eating. The second vignette addressed the condition in which the persona has just had an episode of emotional eating. In both situations the virtual coach responded with validating, focus-on-change, or dialectical coaching feedback on the given situation. To validate the veracity of the vignettes, we assigned participants randomly to two conditions (“when experiencing cravings” and “after emotional eating”) with validation, focus-on-change, and dialectical coaching strategies originating from DBT [40, 43] (see Table 1).
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