Outcome of anorexia nervosa related to treatment utilizing an adolescent medicine approach

The scientific literature suggests that outcome for adolescents with eating disorders bears little relation to the type of treatment used. Practitioners of adolescent medicine care for adolescents with eating disorders and have reported outcome in three studies, to which a fourth is added in this paper. This new sample of 34 adolescents represents consecutive admissions to an inpatient adolescent medicine unit who were then followed as outpatients by the same interdisciplinary treatment team. An average of more than 5 years after hospitalization, the group had a mean weight of 97.9% of normal and 94% were menstruating (87.5% regularly). Depending on the outcome criteria used, between one-half and two-thirds of the subjects had an excellent to good outcome, with only about 10% of subjects symptomatic at follow-up. Comparing the most recent cohort of 34 adolescents (Group II) with the older cohort of 49 subjects (Group I) reveals a trend toward behaviors associated with bulimia more commonly on entering treatment. These encouraging results suggest that adolescent medicine may offer a complementary approach to traditional methods for adolescents with eating disorders.Received M.D. from Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. Research interests are in bone mineral density in females with anorexia nervosa.Received M.D. from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine in Buffalo, NY. Research interests include examination of the relationship of violence and illicit substance use in adolescents and the relationship of physical abuse and bulimia nervosa.     

A “second look” at interviews with adolescents

Interviews are widely used in adolescent study as data collection methods. This article argues that such interviews contain an additional order of data, located in the conversing, which can complement the content analysis and interpretation of answers to questions. This argument is based on treating interviews with adolescents as actual instances of adolescent adult interaction and is illustrated by transcribed passages from a series of interviews with young adolescents. The purpose of the study is to outline how researchers using an interview method can examine records of the talk for valuable supplementary data. The conversational analysis sketched here is, of course, only one possible way of taking this second look. In this area, it would also be a valuable resource for investigators to study how adolescents manage their research participation under a variety of data collection methods. Adequately recorded interviews contain such data, and can be inspected for the presence or clues to the very phenomena researchers may be interested in. All of this requires the understanding that 1) the primary order of empirical data is the talking and, 2) the interviews are instances of adolescent behavior.     

The adolescent as theorist: An interpretive view

This article advances a way of conceptualizing the adolescent as theorist derived from interpretive sociology. This formulation of the adolescent as theorist is contrasted to that available within Piagetian theory. It emphasizes the practical and the occasioned nature of theoretical activity and shows it in everyday settings. Interview conversation between an adolescent and an adult is used as empirical illustration. This formulation of the adolescent as theorist is offered as a means of entry to the scientific constitution of the adolescent as a practitioner of world building who uses the same available resources and does the same sense-making work as any competent member in a culture.Received Ph.D. from University of Toronto. Current interests are the social and scientific constitution of the adolescent, and interpretive methodologies in the study of adolescence.