Materials
     Participants were asked to respond to questionnaires measuring body image satisfaction and perceived social support.  The Body Image Avoidance Questionnaire (Rosen, Srebnik, Saltzberg, & Wendt, 1991) and the Multidimensional Body-Self Relations Questionnaire (Cash and Pruzinsky, 1990) were given to measure the degree of body satisfaction in the participants.  The Eating Disorder Inventory – II (Garner, 1991) was also given to measure body image and attitudes toward food.  The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, & Farley, 1988) and the Perceived Social Support – Friend and Perceived Social Support – Family Scale (Procidano & Heller, 1983) were administered to measure the degree of perceived family and friend social support. 
    The Body Image Avoidance Questionnaire is a 19-item instrument which has been used to measure behaviors that often coexist with body-image disturbance.  This test has a Cronbach’s alpha of .89 for internal consistency and the validity has been correlated with a number of equivalent tests. 
    The Multidimensional Body-Self Relations Questionnaire is a 69 item instrument used to measure attitudes regarding body-image.  This test has been found to have good reliability and validity.  This study used the subscale of Body Areas Satisfaction from this questionnaire.  Body Areas Satisfaction measures satisfaction with specific areas of one’s appearance. 
     The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support is a 12 item instrument used to measure perceived social support from family, friends, and significant others.  The internal consistency of this instrument has been found with an alpha of .91 and also has good validity.  Finally, the Perceived Social Support Friend and Family Scales are used to measure social support from family and friends through two 20 item instruments.  This test has been found to have good reliability and validity. 
     The Eating Disorder Inventory – II (EDI-II) is a 91 item questionnaire that is widely used to measure the symptoms associated with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.  It has a number of subscales:  the Drive for Thinness, Bulimia, Body Dissatisfaction, Ineffectiveness, Perfectionism, Interpersonal Distrust, Introspective Awareness, Maturity Fears, Asceticism, Impulse Regulation, and Social Insecurity. 
     The Drive for Thinness and Bulimia subscales were used to look at participants’ eating behaviors and their attitudes toward food.  The Drive for Thinness subscale measures excessive concern with dieting, preoccupation with weight, and the fear of weight gain.  The Bulimia subscale looks at the tendency to think about and to engage in binge eating.  The Body Dissatisfaction subscale was also used which measures dissatisfaction with the overall shape of the body and with the size of those areas of the body that are the greatest concern to those with eating disorders.  Finally the Interpersonal Distrust subscale was used to look at social support.  This subscale measures a person’s feeling of alienation, reluctance to form close relationships or to express thoughts or feelings to others.
     Internal consistency reliability for the different subscales ranges from .70 to .93, depending on the subscale and the sample measured by the questionnaire.  The EDI-II has demonstrated good test-retest reliability, along with many different types of validity.  The EDI-II is a reliable and valid self-report measure and is respected in the psychological community.

Procedure
     Recruited participants were asked to sign an informed consent form before the study began.  The participants were then asked to complete the five questionnaires in the order they had been given by the researcher.  For 31 of the participants, the study was conducted in a classroom setting on the college campus.  However, 8 participants were asked to complete the questionnaires at home and return them to the researcher. All participants were debriefed about the study through a debriefing form.  They were instructed to contact the researcher by telephone or through e-mail regarding any future questions.  The data was then analyzed by the researcher using a Pearson correlation.