The Relationship Between Disordered Eating Behaviours and Narrative Identity: A Novel Narrative Experience Sampling Methodology

IDA alumna Jennifer Chen presented her Master thesis at the graduation ceremony of the IDA cohort 2022-2024.

Disordered Eating Behaviours (DEBs) are health-compromising patterns that are associated with, and are predictive of clinical eating disorders. A high prevalence is found within the student population, especially during the transition to university made by first-year students. This is a salient period for the formation of students’ narrative identity. Narrative identity can be constructed through explicit connections between parts of the self and the event (SE connections). In the current study, a novel combination of narrative research methods and Experience Sampling Methodology was applied to examine realistic symptom presentations of students during the day. With this, it was hypothesised that a higher degree of DEBs is associated with a higher likelihood of making negative SE connections. For seven days, 54 first-year university students were tasked to provide narratives four times a day. The collected narratives (N = 4400) were coded for the presence of DEBs and negative SE connections. In line with the main hypothesis, results indicated that the presence of DEBs in the narratives was associated with a significantly increased likelihood of having a negative SE connection (OR =1.75, 95% CI[1.34, 2.27], p < .001). These results imply that there is a tendency to integrate maladaptive eating behaviours into student’s daily narratives, and by extent their narrative identity. The current approach has been fruitful in uncovering individual variation in disordered behaviour presentation and could therefore contribute to the development of idiographic symptom profiles by including subclinical symptoms, as well as meaning-making processes.  

Keywords: Disordered Eating Behaviours, students, narrative identity, Experience Sampling 

Methodology, mixed-methods approach, self-event connections

Jennifer is now continuing her career in academia as a PhD candidate at Tilburg University. Congratulations Jennifer and best of luck with your future career!