f the Eating Disorders Inventory compared with the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory). This particular study, as others reported, found that female university students who had eating difficulties tended to also have complaints of anxiety, depression, and other symptoms (Anderson & Meshot, 1992, p. 253) Some writers suggest that the prevalence of eating disorders among female college students is not a new phenomenon but one that is receiving wider recognition because students are more open about psychological matters (Grayson & Medalie, 1989, p. 100). Students of the 1980's and 1990's are more open and tolerant. However, student populations are diverse, and as other authors have r~eported, parental pressures can be great, causing students to seek adaptations to stress. Medalie believes that one of the causes of stress among campus females is the softening of gender roles and less rigid mores in the area of sexual behavior. Often the students of today have free access to each other in coed dorm living arrangements, much different from the more protected living situations of past generations. Sharlene Hesse-Biber finds, as have other researchers, that eating disorders among college women are fairly strictly genderbased (1989, p. 89). Few men adapt to stress with variations in eating behavior. This finding correlates with that of Anne Katherine who believes that women are socialized at a young age 8 to internalize problems and try to cope within the difficult situation rather than fight it or leave it. Hesse-Biber also purports that young women are more susceptible to cultural influences on the type of appearance that is desired for women-ultra-slender. Also the character trait of perfectionism was apparent on those women who took the Eating Disorders Inventory for the Hesse-Biber study. She believes that the eating difficulties of college women must be understood in the cultural context of pressures for attractiveness and t...
