Alison Field studies the eating patterns and weight control behaviors that lead to eating disorders and obesity. Her work is aimed at identifying common risk factors that promote excessive weight gain, excessive weight concerns, and unhealthy weight control behaviors and which could serve as targets for interventions.

She is a co-founder of the Growing Up Today Study, which was established in 1996 to assess the predictors of dietary intake, activity, and weight gain during a four-year period. Her research within the study is primarily related to the epidemiology of weight gain, weight concerns, weight control practices, and bulimic behaviors in 16,800 children of women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study II. She is the principal investigator on the NIH grant to continue following the Growing Up Today Study cohort from 2002 to 2007 to investigate determinants of binge eating, purging (i.e., use of vomiting or laxatives) and eating disorders of at least subsyndromal severity.

She is also the principal investigator of a NIH grant to study the prospective relationship between weight control behaviors and weight change among 15,000 multiethnic adolescents and young adults in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.