Anorexia Nervosa: Its Effect on Anselmo A. Sandoval Memorial National High School's Grade 12 Students Academic Performances

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Eating disorder is a complex disorder influenced by other factors. It is generally believed that a combination of biological, psychological and environment abnormalities contribute to the development of eating disorders. There are three kinds of eating disorder: Binge-eating disorder, Bulimia Nervosa and the most common among the three, Anorexia Nervosa, which is, the focus of this research study. People displaying symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa have been observed by historians and psychologists to be approximately 10-25 years old, normally students.

METHODS

The research is quantitative in nature. The researchers used two set of questionnaires. The first set is to identify students who have tendencies toward Anorexia Nervosa while the second set is to determine the common and mostly occurring effects of the said disorder in a student's Academic Performance. The researchers used probability sampling with stratified random sampling. The Grade 12 students were stratified according to their sections, drawing 20 students each. Out of 260 students, 64 were identified to have strong tendencies towards Anorexia Nervosa and in order to identify the significant difference between the Academic Performance of those who have tendencies and those who does not, another 64 random students from the other group were drawn for comparison. The researchers collected the General Weighted Average of the students who belongs to the two sample group and analyzed using independent t-test.

RESULTS

Out of the 260 successful questionnaires, 24.62% qualified the assessment of having strong tendency towards developing Anorexia Nervosa. Running the second set of questionnaires, the effects of the disorder on their academic performances are then enumerated which are, confusion, dizziness and being lazy because of lack of energy. The researchers also collected every respondents average in order to compare the level of academic performance of those who have strong tendency towards the disorder to the average of those who does not. With the general mean average of 82.70 and 85.73, respectively and with the computed p-value = 0.00 using 0.05 level of significance, the researchers rejected the null hypothesis. Thus, there is a significant different between the academic performance of students who have strong tendency towards Anorexia Nervosa and to those who does not. Furthermore, statistically shows that the student that are not at risk of Anorexia Nervosa have a good academic performance.

DISCUSSIONS

The significant difference between the academic performance of an Anorexic person and a person who does not have Anorexia as the result, demonstrates the need for a convenient way to deal with the possible increase in number of Anorexic persons, specifically students, the reason why the researchers have come up with an idea of creating an offline mobile application that mainly talks about everything regarding the said disorder.