Social Context, Gender Identity and Eating Disorders in Western and Eastern Europe: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Study
✍ Scribed by Ana Catina; Svetlana Boyadjieva; Michaela Bergner
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 413 KB
- Volume
- 4
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-4133
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The present paper reports preliminary results of a pibt study carried out on two samples of females living in two different European countries. The onset of eating disorders is considered to result from females' difficulties in developing a genderspecific identity in a specific social context that provides and supports certain deals, interpersonal relationships, and attitudes toward them. Thirty-five German females and 20 Bulgarians have been questioned about the way they perceive themselves, the social ideal, the attractivity in women, the problem of individuation and separation, autonomy and social relationship in general. The results indicate that certain social models are more likely to induce dentity conflicts in the German sampk than in the Bulgarian cme.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Two observations in the field of eating disorders constituted the starting point of a German-Bulgarian joint research project. The first concerns the fact that eating disorders affect prevalently the female population in adolescence and early womanhood. Since these stages in life are marked by the development of social and professional identity, a linkage has been assumed between the process of identity formation and the onset of eating disorders. Furthermore, it can also be assumed that gender-specific issues of the identity formation process might be involved. The second observation concerns the fact that eating disorders seem to be culture-bound syndromes. They are more common in societies with the western type of culture and of a high economic level of development (Dolan, 1991;Boyadjieva and Gantchev, 1993). There is a strong impression that eating disorders are rarer in developing countries, but become more common as a country develops economically (Hsu, 1990).
Taking into account these observations, we started to consider the idea that the sociopsychological background emerging from different economic contexts