A Study of Abnormal Eating Attitudes and Family Relationship in Adolescence

Abstract

　　Recently, the number of eating disorders has increased and there are some adolescent with abnormal eating attitudes similar to eating disorders. But family relation of them in not taken up as a main subject.

　　The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between abnormal eating attitudes and family relationship.

　　In the primary research, a sample of 249 female college students were asked to fulfill following questionnaire, i.e. Eating Attitude Test (EAT-20), FACES Ⅲ, Sentence Completion Test on family relation (SCT) and so on.

　　There was no significant relation between EAT-20 and FACES Ⅲ. On the other hand, the result of SCT shows that subjects with high EAT-20 scores had more negative attitude toward their families than that with low EAT-20 scores.

　　In the second research, figures of family relationship in Schematic Projective Techniques were administered to.12 female college students with high EAT-20 scores (High group), 11 female college students with low EAT-20 scores (Low group) and 3 female eating disorderes (Clinical group).

　　High group was significantly shorter in the distances among each family members than Low group. Cluster analysis revealed that High group was rather similar to Clinical group at the types of family figure. However, some atypical cases were also found in High group.

　　The similarity on family relationship between some adolescent with abnormal eating attitudes and eating disorders was discussed, and the discussion was based on these findings.