Structural Model of Association Between Child Abuse and Disordered Eating: Extension of the Coping With Trauma Model

157 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.Disordered eating behaviors are prevalent in the community of university women, impacting both well-being and ability to function. Efforts to understand the complex etiology of disordered eating and eating disorders have resulted in a trend towards examinations of multivariate models. Although childhood abuse has been implicated in this process, very few empirically tested models including this factor exist. In the current study, structural equation modeling was used to investigate a combination of three previous models examining child abuse as a contributory factor. In the final model that best fit the data, levels of cohesion and conflict in the family environment were related to child emotional and physical abuse. Abuse was further related to alexithymia and distress. Alexithymia was associated with distress which was further related to body image, restrictive eating and binge eating. Body image was also related to both restrictive eating and binge eating behaviors. Finally, restrictive eating was associated with binge eating behaviors. The association between child abuse and body image was found to be insignificant. A surprising result included a small, but significant, negative pathway from distress to restrictive eating. However, the overall indirect effect of distress on restriction was moderately positive. This model accounted for 82% of the variance in the self-report data collected from 677 college women at a Midwestern university. While the best-fitting model is only one of several possibilities, these results point to a weak---but significant---complex relation among family environment, child abuse and disordered eating. They are associated through a series of mediating relations in a multivariate model including alexithymia, general distress, and body image.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD