Socio-cultural factors contributing to eating disorder development amongst women of South Asian ethnicity: a meta-synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study is to synthesize published empirical qualitative evidence which explores the socio-cultural influences on the development of eating disorders from the perspective of South Asian women. Design/methodology/approach A systematic search of the databases CINAHL, MEDLINE, Scopus and APA PsycINFO was conducted to identify relevant journal articles published up to August 2023. The quality of the included studies was appraised using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme Qualitative Tool. Data was synthesized and analysed using thematic synthesis. Findings Four studies from the UK, USA and Canada were included in the meta-synthesis. Three main themes were found: gratifying others, negative childhood experiences and shame and stigma. Practical implications South Asian women report many socio-cultural factors that can influence eating disorder development. Findings of this meta-synthesis highlight the importance of cultural awareness, and health-care professionals should be aware of the nuanced socio-cultural factors that can influence a South Asian woman’s relationship with food and body image. Originality/value South Asian communities are understudied in the context of mental health, including eating disorders. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to synthesize the available qualitative evidence on socio-cultural influences on eating disorder development among South Asian women. These findings have revealed insights that can be harnessed by health-care professionals to better understand factors that contribute to eating disorder development and support cultural awareness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".