This study was conducted to tell whether female athletes are more susceptible to form eating disorders than females who aren't athletes. Most studies of this nature use females in college, on the contrary this article uses adolescent females attending high school. Female athletes are a potential risk group for developing eating disorders and most females from the other reports attending college said that they developed their habits at a younger age. Therefore, it makes more sense to me to conduct an experiment among high school girls. The study was conducted in the winter of 1992 by two women; Diane E. Taub and Elaine M. Blinde, and published in Vol.27 Issue 108 of the journal Adolescence. The location of the study was the medium-sized Midwestern city of Carbondale, Illinois.
The hypothesis of the study was that female athletes are more prone to have traits associated with eating disorders as well as pathogenic weight control techniques than female non-athletes. Some examples of pathogenic weight control techniques are: laxatives, vomiting, fasting, and diet aids. Sport-by-sport comparisons were also used in order to help determine if athletes in certain sports were at higher risk than athletes in other sports.
The high school female athletes and non-athletes were the independent variables in this study. There were a couple dependent variables, one being the behavioral and psychological traits associated with eating disorders, and the other was the use of pathogenic weight control techniques. The high school female athletes and non-athletes were also the subjects of this study; they were selected from grades 9 through 12. Some students were taken from physical education classes consisting of both athletes and non-athletes. There were also athletes who were not in a physical education class, therefore in an attempt to obtain responses from all of the athletes these particular students were located and asked to participate in the study.