cteristics. The authors state that the eating disorder is the individual's attempt to wrest control away from an overly controlling family.
Brone and Fisher's views are relatively new in that they postulate connectedness between family factors and power/control issues, a view not previously present in the existing literature. The authors state that this notion of connectedness between these variables deserves further investigation.
Although, as just noted, the existing literature on eating disorders is composed of articles and research delineating and discussing familial factors and power/control issues in individuals with eating disorders, there is little research examining relationships between familial factors and control/power issues. In a literature search of 972 studies in the Psychological Literature database, the only literature on relationships between familial contributions to eating disorders and the power/control issues of eating disorder clients was theoretical rather than empirical.
The paucity of research indicates that the eating disorder literature needs to be expanded with research that aims at exploring for possible relationships between family etiology and power/control issues in samples of eating disorder clients. The research problem investigated in this study constitutes such an examination. Since the literature has so heavily focused on power and control problems, it seems reasonable to suggest that one familial factor that might be related to eating disorders is parental authority. Thus, this study examined for relationships between measures of parental authority and power/control issues in samples of eating disorder clients.
This study examined whether parental perceptions of authority were related to a variety of power/control issues in a sample of bulimic and anorexic-bulimic patients admitted for treatment at pre-selected eating disorder units. The examination was conducted to test the not...