Buffie Longmire-Avital, associate professor of psychology, and alumna Chelsea McQueen ‘15 publish an article in a top Women’s Studies journal on the relationship between race-related stress and emotional eating for black collegiate women.
Buffie Longmire-Avital, associate professor of psychology and Chelsea McQueen ‘15 conducted an internet-based study to explore how perceptions of chronic discrimination relate to stress and obesity risk behaviors among black American collegiate women.
Specifically, this study sought to investigate a relationship between race-related stress (i.e., stress as a result of perceived ongoing racial discrimination) and emotional eating habits. Given that four out of five black American women ages 20 and over meet criteria for being overweight or obese, this study aimed to investigate a critical social determinant of health for this higher risk population.
Recruiting women through social-networking sites and blog subscribers, Longmire-Avital and McQueen, an Honors Fellow at Elon, gathered quantitative data from a sample of 149 young adult women. Hierarchical linear regression was used to show that race-related stress was a significant and independent predictor for emotional eating even after controlling for weight and general perceived stress.
The article discusses these findings in terms of their public health implication for the importance of the addressing perceived racial experience when developing interventions for black women. The article is published in Women & Health, which is ranked 14 out of the top 50 journals that focus on women, gender and sexuality studies.
The online first article citation is listed below:
Buffie Longmire-Avital & Chelsea McQueen (2018) Exploring a relationship between race-related stress and emotional eating for collegiate Black American women, Women & Health, DOI: 10.1080/03630242.2018.1478361
McQueen has just completed her master’s degree in community psychology at Vanderbilt University and is currently serving as a clinical research coordinator at the Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders.