A study of eating disorder between athletes and non-athletes

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to compare eating disorder of athletes and non-athletes. To achieve the purpose of the study, 60 women were selected from the affiliated colleges of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University. The selected subjects were divided into two groups with 30 subjects each namely athletes and non-athletes. The athletes are randomly selected and also, care was taken to include only those subjects who had to their credit, some distinguished performance in their respective events at various competitions. Totally 30 athletes were selected for this study. The non-athletes are considering as those who never participate in any sports activities. The eating disorder such as Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge-Eating Disorder were selected as dependent variables for this study. The eating disorder was measured by questionnaire namely Eating Attitude Test (EAT) which was developed by Garner & Garfinkel in 1979. The Eating Attitude Test (EAT) which contains 20 questions is an abbreviated version of the original 40- question (EAT-40) test. Participants rate their responses to statements with each of the items using a 5-point likert scale: “Always”, “usually”, “often”, “sometimes”, and “never”. Normally, the people whose score is equivalent to or greater than 20 are considered as having eating disorder symptoms. The static group comparison design was used for this study. All the subjects were tested on selected psychological variable. The data pertaining to the variables were examined by using independent‘t’ test. The level of significance was fixed at .05 level of confidence for all the cases. It was concluded that, there was a significant difference exists between athletes and non-athletes on the selected eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. However, non-athletes showed poor eating habit when compared to athletes.