32 Chapter 2 score indicating a general level of psychopathology. Higher scores indicate a higher level of psychopathology. The reliability and validity of the SCL-90 are good (Arrindell & Ettema, 2003) and internal consistency was found to be excellent in the present sample (α = .974). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used to measure levels of depression (Beck et al., 1961). The BDI consists of 21 questions about the severity of depressive complaints in the last week. These questions are answered on a scale of 0 to 3 (e.g: 0: I do not feel sad; 1: I feel sad; 2: I am sad all the time and I can’t snap out of it; 3: I am so sad or unhappy that I can’t stand it). The 21 items are summed for a total score. Higher scores indicate higher levels of depression. The reliability and validity of the BDI are good (Beck et al., 1988; Bouman et al., 1985) and internal consistency proved to be good in the present sample (α = .857). Personality The Dutch version of the Revised Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) was used to assess personality characteristics (Hoekstra et al., 1996; original version by Costa & McCrae, 1992). This questionnaire was added to the test battery in August 2004, resulting in 378 patients filling out the NEO-PI-R at pretreatment. The NEO-PI-R consists of 240 items such as ‘I sometimes have wild ideas’, which are answered on a 5-point Likert scale. The NEO-PI-R consists of five personality dimensions, each measured with 48 items: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Higher scores indicate a higher level of the specific personality dimension. The reliability and validity are considered to be good (e.g., Costa & Widiger, 1994; Hoekstra et al, 1996, Hoekstra et al., 2003; Piedmont, 1998). Background variables In addition to the aforementioned questionnaires, patients were measured for height and weight (through which we computed their BMI: kg/m²), and were asked about gender, age, work, marital status, living situation and level of education2. We combined marital status and living situation (e.g., living with parents) to calculate social embedding. Those patients that were in a romantic relationship or lived with their parents were rated as having a high social embedding, whereas those patients that did not have a romantic relationship and did not live with their parents were rated as having low social embedding. 2 We also asked for duration of the eating disorder (at pre-test, post-test and follow-up). It was found that patients answered this question inconsistently across time points. We therefore excluded this variable from our analyses.
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