The factorial structure and psychometric properties of the Committed Action Questionnaire (CAQ-8) in a Portuguese clinical sample with eating disorders

The Committed Action Questionnaire (CAQ-8) is an instrument developed to measure committed action, an adaptive psychological process. The main goal in the current study was to confirm the factorial structure of the Portuguese version of the CAQ-8 in a transdiagnostic clinical sample of participants diagnosed with an eating disorder (ED). Participants were 102 female outpatients (Mage = 28.1, SD = 10.6; MBMI = 20.0, SD = 5.5) recruited from a clinical setting specialized in the treatment of ED. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to confirm the CAQ-8's factorial structure. Both first- and second-order models revealed adequate goodness-of-fit indices (e.g. χ2/df = 1.545, p =.06; SRMR = 0.049; RMSEA = 0.073; CFI/TLI > 0.95). A moderation model revealed that the conditional effect of weight, shape and eating concerns on experiential avoidance was significantly moderated by increased levels of committed action, F(3, 97) = 23.79, p <.001, accounting for 42% of the final variance. The present study supports the usefulness of the CAQ-8 as a measure of levels of committed action with patients diagnosed with an ED.
Funding. This research has been conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), School of Psychology of the University of Minho, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the Portuguese State Budget (UIDB/01662/2020). This project is supported by a research funding granted to the PI (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028145), and by a PhD studentship granted to the first author (SFRH/BD/143601/2019), supported by the FCT, funded with allocations from the State Budget of the Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education and with allocations from the European Social Fund, to be made available under PORTUGAL2020, namely through the North Regional Operational Program (NORTE 2020).