Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

1998

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design

Department

Human Nutrition and Foods

Committee Chair

Mary K. Head.

Abstract

Desire for thinness and desire for health were surveyed among eighteen and nineteen year old female adolescents in north-central West Virginia to determine the incidence of these motivations within this population and their relationship to unnecessary weight loss concerns, and dieting behaviors. Variables derived from body image satisfaction, self-esteem, socioeconomic status, religiosity, and food management behavior were examined for their ability to predict desire for thinness and health in subjects.;Using the statistical process of discriminate analysis, 51.6% of 345 subjects were correctly classified into groups desiring thinness and/or health. Only weight perception accuracy and food management group were found to be significant individual predictors, but their Eigenvalues indicated a low degree of predictive power.;The low predictive power of the variables may have been due to inaccurate separation of subjects into dependent variables groups. The data on desire for health indicate that female adolescent concepts of health may be multidimensional.

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