But many campuses devote few resources to counseling women engaged in those behaviors, she said. And there is a movement toward sending those with fully developed eating disorders to off-campus treatment centers, in part because the treatment is so expensive.
"I think this research lends support to the idea that we can do something in college counseling centers and have a tremendous effect," she said.
Previous research on the association between childhood sexual abuse and eating disorders had produced inconsistent and confusing results because it did not take multiple factors into account, Hund said. "In reality, the association between a history of childhood sexual abuse and disordered eating behaviors is very complex," she said.
The researchers believe their study is the first on this topic to take those multiple factors into account, using a research technique called structural equation modeling.
Using results from previous research, including work by Espelage and Suzanne Mazzeo, now a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, the researchers developed a hypothetical model or map of associations between various factors. The factors in the model included childhood sexual abuse, general psychological distress, alexithymia, restrictive eating behaviors and attitudes, body dissatisfaction, and bulimic eating behaviors (such as binging and purging).
Alexithymia (uh-lex-uh-THIGH-me-uh) is defined as a condition in which a person is unable to recognize or describe his or her own emotions. Hund described it as "a disconnect between emotions and the rest of you."
Their data was gathered through a written survey administered to 608 undergraduate and graduate women at a large Midwestern university, producing 589 usable responses.
What the researchers found when they sorted out the data was that it fit their hypothetical model of how the various factors were associated and how
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Contact: Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
cdchambe@uiuc.edu
217-333-2894
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
19-Dec-2005