To my surprise, I found it incredibly hard to find a written journal about organic food, and just food ethics in general in the Armacost Library. But, since I am incredibly interested in eating patterns and the thought process that goes on behind food decisions, I found a scholarly article called, “Body dissatisfaction, excessive exercise, and weight change strategies used by first-year undergraduate students: comparing health and physical education and other education students” that came from the peer-reviewed journal “Journal of Eating Disorders”. The contributing authors are Tonia Gray, Christina Curry, and Sian A. McLean. This journal was published on April 3, 2017.

In this study, university students were surveyed that were studying to become Health and Physical Education teachers, or teachers of other subjects, and compared these two groups in terms of how they think and feel about their body, to what degree do they want to be thinner or more muscular, and what sort of behaviours they are engaging in.
They discovered that male Health and Physical Education students were more likely to want to be muscular and to be engaging in excessive exercise, dieting, and the use of anabolic steroids than other male teacher education students. Female Health and Physical Education students were more likely to engage in excessive exercise over other female education students(Journal of Eating Disorders). These results mean that attitudes and behaviours of teachers who are presenting information about food and exercise in schools should be carefully examined.

The type of data that was used was demographic data, psychological traits, and deep opinions and attitudes. The data collection method that was used was a combination of detached observation, in-depth interviews, and surveys.

Researchers visited the lectures of students in order to provide information about the study, invite survey participation, and conduct hard-copy data collection during class time, supervised by the researchers, for the first cohort at all universities. The second University of Western Sydney cohort was also recruited and conducted in this manner but the questionnaires were completed online. For the second La Trobe University and Victoria University cohorts, researchers visited lectures to introduce and provide information about the study, and then emailed the students the link to the survey. For these cohorts, survey completion was conducted online, was not supervised, and resulted in much lower participant numbers. Exact numbers of students present in class or emailed were not recorded, so response rates are not calculated. All participants provided written informed consent to participate either online through Qualtrics or by signing a consent form(Journal of Eating Disorders). Independent-samples t-tests compared age and BMI for HPE and non-HPE groups. Analysis of covariance controlling for demographic variables that differed between the two participant groups examined differences between HPE and non-HPE participants for body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, and drive for muscularity. A series of multiple logistic regression analyses was conducted separately for men and women to examine associations between degree (HPE and non-HPE) and the dichotomous dependent variables for each of the weight change behaviors, controlling for demographic variables that differed between the two participant groups(Journal of Eating Disorders).
I thought this was an incredibly interesting study and although it it slightly different compared to my original research and research question, I am now incredibly interested in this research. I plan on incorporating this into my research and even possibly tweaking my own research question to fit more into this realm. I feel like having a combination of data collection methods in research is a way that leaves very little room for error and broadens the type of data received. They provided, tables, charts, as well as concrete evidence.

Tonia Gray, Christina Curry, and Sian. A McLean. 2017 “Body dissatisfaction, excessive exercise, and weight change strategies used by first-year undergraduate students: comparing health and physical education and other education students.” Journal of Eating Disorders 5:10.