<div>Intuitive Eating Scale-2 (IES-2) is a measurement of intuitive eating
behaviors and has been validated, with traditional latent variable
approaches, in youth and adults from a number of different populations,
including college students in China. However, there still lacks the
evaluation of the psychometric properties of the IES-2 in adults from
the Chinese general population. Moreover, psychometric network analysis,
as a complement to traditional latent variable approaches, has not been
used for examining the psychometric properties of the IES-2. Thus, the
present study aimed to use a psychometric network approach to evaluate
the psychometric properties of the IES-2 in Chinese adults from the
general population. A sample of 700 Chinese general adults (50% women;
<i>M</i> <sub>age</sub> = 31.13 years, <i>SD</i> = 9.19) were
included in the present study. Psychometric network analysis was
performed by using <i>EGAnet</i> and <i>psychonetrics</i> packages on R
4.2.0. Exploratory graph analysis (EGA) identified four dimensions,
which were well-separated in the estimated network. The network
structure showed excellent stability and metric measurement invariance
(i.e., network loadings) across men and women. Furthermore, several
items in the IES-2 were identified as key nodes in the network of the
IES-2 that may be important for the developement and maintenance of
intuitive eating. For example, two items related to reliance on body
cues were the most impactful nodes in the complete network. The findings
of our study provide further understandings of the IES-2 from the
perspective of network analysis and have implications for related
applications of intuitive eating interventions for general populations.</div>