The relationship between disordered eating behaviours and narrative identity in university students: a novel narrative experience sampling methodology.

Background: 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 undergraduate students. This is also a salient period for the formation of students' narrative identity, which is the internalised story that individuals construct to shape their identity. Across daily life, individuals may tell "small stories" about their experiences, which may become part of the self through explicit connections between parts of the self and experienced events, called self-event connections. In the current study, a novel combination of narrative research methods and Experience Sampling Methodology was applied to examine the realistic presentation of DEBs, and how they may impact the formation of self-event connections. It was hypothesised that a higher degree of DEBs is associated with a higher likelihood of making negative self-event connections.

Method: For seven days, 54 first-year university students (48 female, 5 male, 1 non-binary) were tasked to provide narratives four times a day. The collected narratives (N = 4400) were coded for the presence of DEBs and negatively valenced self-event connections. These were analysed through a multilevel logistic regression model with the negative self-event connections as binary outcome, and DEBs per day as a predictor.

Results: In line with the main hypothesis, the presence of DEBs in the narratives was on average associated with an increased likelihood of making a negative self-event connection (OR = 2.87, 95% CI[1.68, 4.88], p < .001). This implies that students who mention DEBs in their narratives were 2.87 times more likely to also make a negative self-event connection.

Conclusions: DEBs may be key experiences that may be linked to the self through "small stories" at a daily level. Focusing on individual experiences of DEBs may be important in promoting healthier narrative identity development in the long run, while also contributing to personalised assessment of subclinical eating disorder symptoms.