Abstract
Objective. Past research suggests that eating alone is associated with less social support and poorer physical health. The current study examines the comparative health and well-being of Hispanic/Latino(a/x) and non-Hispanic/Latino(a/x) students, with a focus on comparing self-reported well-being to the observed marker of social well-being that is eating alone.
Participants. Undergraduate students from a college dining hall completed online surveys in exchange for a gift card.
Methods. Participants completed measures of eating alone in the dining hall, food choices, social support, quality of life, and overall health.
Results. Although, compared to their non-Hispanic/Latino(a/x) peers, Hispanic/Latino(a/x) students were much more likely to be eating with others, both groups reported similar levels of social support and life satisfaction. Furthermore, Hispanic/Latino(a/x) students reported poorer physical health and chose unhealthier meals.
Conclusion. Although Hispanic/Latino(a/x) students appeared to be more socially connected than their peers, these connections did not translate to better well-being.
Conflict of interest disclosure
The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of the University of California, Merced.
Notes
1 See Ware and Sherbourne (1992) for a full list of the SF-36 items. In order to minimize participant burden, we included items which gauged general health, health change, and social functioning as we felt that they best captured students’ overall perceptions of their health. Other subscales such as those measuring pain were not as relevant to a student population and we did not use items from the emotional health subscale as we believe we are able to capture emotional health, at least in part, through our measure of quality of life.
2 Coders were instructed to intuit the healthiness of meals based on photos and descriptions provided by participants. Practice coding revealed that coders were successful in distinguishing healthy and unhealthy foods. Coders also attempted to use an online application to code nutritional information for each meal. However, the online application provided inconsistent results for similar inputs. As such, ratings were unreliable and we did not report them here.
3 Appendix A contains a list of the food options served at the university dining hall and is available at https://osf.io/u4a67/. Choice of Mexican/Latin food was unrelated to meal healthiness ratings, r = .03, p = .82, CI95% = [-.19, .24].