Cooper, P. J., Taylor, M. J., Cooper, Z. & Fairburn, C.G. (1986) The development and validation of the Body Shape Questionnaire. International Journal of Eating Disorders 6:485-494.
Those were the days before people were very concerned about copyright and intellectual property rights in the academic world and, as Bridget particularly knew Peter Cooper from conferences, we went ahead and explored the psychometrics of the measure from our accumulated data and proposed two sixteen item shortened versions and four eight item versions and we put the text of these on the WWW. Everything but the last is, of course, entirely legal. However, times have changed and the text of the original questionnaire is not mine and is copyright to its authors and so, therefore is the text of the shortened versions. They know of the shortened forms and have never complained about them nor do I know of them refusing to let anyone use them in this form but to be legally safe, you should get their permission before using the measure.
The work that led to these shortened forms is described in:
Evans, C. & Dolan, B. (1993) Body Shape Questionnaire: derivation of shortened "alternate forms".
International Journal of Eating Disorders 13:315-321.
and I'm happy to send anyone a copy of that paper by snail mail if they Email me a snailmail address (make sure I know what paper you want, I get a lot of Email for a lot of things so "Yes please", or even "Please send me a copy" is likely to waste time for both of us!)
What I have mounted here is:
In the past I have said:
If you are planning to use this questionnaire in a study, I would
be very grateful if you would communicate with me so that I can
give you any advice that may be useful. I may also be able to
arrange for scoring and analysis of the questionnaire if you
don't have the local facilities for this to be done easily.
I can be reached by snail mail at:
Rampton Hospital, Retford, Notts. DN22 0PD Britian
by telephone at [+44|0] 1777 247242 and 'fax at:
[+44|0] 1777 247212 (mark "f.a.o. Chris Evans")">
I haven't worked in body image or eating disorders for over a decade now and the only person who ever took me up on that, did so when I was buried in other work and I was unable to assist them and have now lost contact details with that person (apologies if you do see this, do get back at me if it's still pertinent). However, I do work on psychometrics still so if you're interested in doing a good analysis of moderately large dataset of BSQ34 data to recheck the shortening specification but you need psychometric help, do try me!
Chris Evans,