Recent years have witnessed an increased concern with unhealthy nutrition and its dire financial, health, social, and psychological consequences. Although much of the health communication literature has concentrated on children, adolescents and young adults are especially vulnerable to unhealthy eating. College freshmen seem particularly prone to unhealthy eating and weight gain.; The overarching question of this dissertation is whether exposure to food on television, together with social and psychological factors, contributes to weight gain in college freshmen. A socialization perspective was used to investigate the potential links between college freshmen's unhealthy eating and weight gain on one hand and their susceptibility to environmental, social, and psychological factors on the other. Three main findings arose out of this study. First, contrary to some suggestions in the literature, the phenomenon of weight gain was observed clearly in a relatively small sample, suggesting that weight gain among freshmen might be more pervasive than previously thought. Second, the observed relationships were small in size, suggesting that more factors should be considered by future research investigating weight gain among college freshmen. And third, more links between unhealthy eating/weight gain and environmental, social, and psychological factors were found from analyses done separately by respondent weight category than from analyses done for all respondents as a whole. The implication of this finding is that current weight might also be a factor in the unhealthy eating/weight gain phenomenon.
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