Social Context, Gender Identity and Eating Disorders in Western and Eastern Europe: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Study

Abstract

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 BACKGROUNDTwo 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

Cultural correlates of eating attitudes: A comparison between native‐born and immigrant university students in Israel

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An investigation of perceived body aesthetics and its contribution to the empowerment of marketing strategies for sporting goods

“…Some authors have argued that the socialist system, with its emphases on egalitarianism, rejection of traditional views of femininity and lack of objectifi cation of female bodies, protected women from excessive concerns with physical appearance, the tyranny of the thin body ideal and disordered eating. 1,9,10 Even if this assessment is correct, these protections were lost with the decline of the socialist system and the development of market economies. It seems very likely that the loss of these protections, combined with the enormous social and economic stresses associated with the rapid introduction of Western values and the rapidly changing roles of women, have contributed to the marked increase in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in Eastern Europe.…”