Ariel also points out that the magazines talk about exercising and being thin but then describes the dangers in dieting. The women feel the magazines are very contradictory regarding how a woman should act when trying to change her body shape and size.
The magazines have many advertisements for shaving and make-up to show how a woman should look in our society. She felt that Self is not a good health magazine because it has the same amount of make-up ads that Cosmopolitan has and still focused on being really skinny. Session 2- Maria and Jackie. Maria and Jackie, both twenty-four and overweight, chose to first look through Cosmopolitan magazine. Maria and Jackie pointed out numerous ads in which the female model stood out to them.
Maria and Jackie questioned exactly what each ad was trying to sell or convey to the readers of the magazine, as several of the ads showed a nearly-naked model posed in a provocative way.
While the major focus for Maria and Jackie was on the extreme thinness of the models, they also commented on other aspects of the female models: breast size, hairstyle, and makeup. Although Maria and Jackie seemed to reject the thinness of the models, they did seem to accept and even desire other aspects of the models, such as: breast size and hairstyle; perhaps suggesting that focus has been shifted away from strictly thinness and has poured over into other sectors of body image.
Maria and Jackie then switched to Self magazine. They seemed to be more accepting of the female models in this magazine. The women summed up by saying, Self is a better influence on women because of the number of ads and feature articles that depicted women as being strong and lean, rather than bony and skinny as in Cosmopolitan. Belle and Jasmine, twenty and twenty-four both of who are average weight, began their session by reading Cosmopolitan.
Although most of their comments could not be applied to this study, the girls did say that they thought that the models portrayed in the second magazine seemed to be healthier and have more realistic body shapes and sizes. Haley, twenty-two and average weight, and Robin, twenty-three and overweight, first looked over Self. The women commented on the diet pill advertisements and how they were contradictory to the fitness, exercise and health food programs in the magazine. Many times during the session the girls commented on how unrealistic many of the advertisements in the magazine were.
Although Robin admits she uses the exercise tips, both women felt the exercise programs were designed for women who were already skinny. The girls were very critical of the magazine; however, they did say some positive things about the exercise and the food tips.
Next, Haley and Robin looked at Cosmopolitan. The women discussed how throughout the magazine there were half-naked skinny models getting touched or ogled by men. For a third perspective on this project, in-depth interviews were conducted in order to gain further insight into whether or not college-age women are affected by magazine exposure.
We interviewed four women, ages eighteen to twenty-three, for about thirty minutes each and asked them a series of questions see Table Seven about the way they perceive magazines and how they react to them. See Table Eight for demographics of interviewees. Table 7- Interview questions. What are your feelings about your body?
Would you describe you self-esteem as being high, medium, or low? Are there factors, either present or past, that affect the way you view your body? If so, what are they? If so, who is that someone else? How often do you read magazines? Which magazines do you read? How do magazines affect the way you feel about yourself? How do you react towards magazine models?
What would you describe as an ideal body? Comment on whether or not magazines portray realistic body images. How do magazines affect your eating habits and exercise habits? How do female models make you feel about yourself? Table 8- Demographics of interviewees. Frequency of magazine reading. Once in a while. Very infrequently. Maggie, twenty-three, says that she has mostly positive thoughts about her body.
By exercising and eating well she maintains her healthy body image. She exercises mostly for herself, to become stronger and reach her goals but she says that she cannot deny that part of the reason that she exercises is to change the way she looks. Maggie describes her self-esteem concerning her body to be around medium or low but her overall self-esteem as medium or high. She admits that, throughout her life, images from the media have affected the way she views her body.
She wishes that her body more closely resembled other women but could not pinpoint any one person. Magazines do show real women, not airbrushed women, according to Maggie but they are not realistic ideals because they are too thin for the norm. She says that magazines change her thoughts about dieting and exercising but not her actions.
Lisa, twenty-one, feels comfortable with her body but there are always things that she would like to change about herself. She also feels that she has a high self-esteem. She feels that gaining weight and going on birth control has affected her body image.
She knows that the media does play a role but she is conscious about this so she is not affected as much as she could be. She does wish that her body could look more like other women such as, some of her friends or models. The magazines she reads, Cosmopolitan and Glamour , do not really affect her since she mostly looks at the articles and not at the pictures.
Lisa sees magazine models as a small percentage of the population who are also altered, by computer, to look the way they do. She exercises and tries to eat healthy in order to feel good about herself. Cecilia, eighteen, responded that she felt that she was overweight and not particularly happy with her body shape and size.
She stated that she had a medium self-esteem, neither high nor low. She believes that some of the things that influence the way she feels about her body are the media, the culture of thinness and the way her peers treat people her size.
She said a thin layer of fat would be ideal not too skinny but not too fat. The models, in general, do not really affect the way she feels about herself and actually make her happy that she is not that thin.
However, she does use some of the exercises that some magazines provide because they are non expensive and easily accessible. Lucy, twenty-one, states that she has a medium self-esteem, when pertaining to how she feels about her body. She knows she is a little underweight, yet she sometimes feels uncomfortable because she is not really in shape or toned. There is not one person exactly that she can come up with in regards to whom she wished her body looked like; however, she does find herself often comparing her body to other women her age.
Lucy does not have any magazine subscriptions but once in a while she reads Cosmopolitan. Although she does not feel as if she has an ideal body size and shape, she is pretty accepting of that. Our interviews suggest that female models in magazines often, but not always, negatively affect the body image of college-age women. However, these negative effects do not always lead to very dangerous behavior, such as changing eating habits or taking diet pills.
Mostly, the negative effects consist of making some women feel as if they are not thin enough or not as beautiful as models because their bodies are not similar. However, we also found that many women avoid magazines or try to remind themselves of the unrealistic nature in order to preserve their body image.
This finding suggests that an active healthy lifestyle is pro-active to a positive image that may possibly counteract the negative effects of a magazine. Overall, the in-depth interviews provided our research group with rich data and we next used an experiment to differentiate between reading magazines in general and having read a magazine prior to taking the survey from method one to further our data. For a fourth perspective on this project, we conducted an experiment to study the effects of reading different types of magazines on college-age females.
We recruited twelve women, without revealing the focus of the experiment. When they arrived, we informed the participants that there would be a short delay while we prepared and that they could read through a magazine during the wait.
We gave each of them one of following magazines: Self , Cosmopolitan , or Newsweek, a news magazine that includes articles regarding current events and other important news-related stories. The magazines were distributed equally among participants and each being represented four times. After about ten minutes of waiting time, the women were given a survey very similar to the one used in method one concerning their body image and its relation to magazines.
Table Nine see Appendix A lists the survey questions and average response to each question. As Table Nine describes, most of the women were satisfied with their body shape and size, as the survey yielded a mean of 3. Across the three groups, the women also agreed that magazines rarely, if ever, portray a realistic body image for women. The data was analyzed by looking at the means. The means from our data showed many findings so we chose to look closely at the ten questions from Table Eight.
The most statistically significant finding shows that the women are often or always happy with their body shape and size. Those who read Self are more often than those who read Cosmopolitan and Newsweek to have moods that are negatively affected by magazines and the female models in them. This is interesting since the women who read Self believe more strongly that the models in magazines do not portray realistic images of women.
All of the women agree that it would not be good for their health if they looked like a magazine model. The women also believe that they would be somewhat happier if they looked like a model.
For the remainder of the survey questions, differences emerged among the treatment groups. Therefore, our group focused on a few questions from the survey that the women from each group disagreed on in order to see what kind of analysis we could develop. Table Nine lists these questions and the average response by treatment group. The following paragraphs describe the patterns that emerged.
Due to having the women fill out the surveys immediately after looking at the magazines, we thought the women who read Newsweek would have a higher body image and not be as affected by the magazines.
After analyzing a few key questions we found that this was not always true. Of the women reading Newsweek fifty percent believed that models have an ideal body size and shape while seventy-five percent of the respondents from the other treatment groups rarely believed this to be true. On a similar note, fifty percent of Newsweek readers often believed that women would be more attractive if they looked more like a model. The same percent of Self readers only sometimes found this to be true and the Cosmopolitan readers responded with rarely.
Of the Self readers fifty percent are sometimes affected while Cosmopolitan and Newsweek readers are rarely affected. The moods of over half of the women reading Self are always negatively affected after reading a magazine while the moods of the same percent of women reading Cosmopolitan and Newsweek are rarely affected. These findings show that the women reading Newsweek may believe that women should look more like models yet they do not always let the models affect their feelings about themselves.
Following the frequency analysis, further analysis was conducted using cross tabulations, which provided other interesting results. The survey data was then analyzed through cross tabulations. Each cross tabulation compared the type of magazine the respondent read to her answer and then to a series of questions on body image see Table One.
Our research group had hypothesized that reading a beauty magazine prior to the survey would provide vastly different answers than would reading a news magazine.
However, the data presented showed that each question gave scattered responses across all three types of magazines. By doing this experiment we did not find any significant data to prove that the type of magazine a person read affected their answer, but we did find data that goes along with our overall hypothesis for this study.
The first significant finding was from question one and question ten. Overall, the data found in the experimental part of this research project was not significant. The data was similarly scattered throughout each type of magazine, suggesting that the type of magazine read prior to the body image survey did not have a significant impact on the survey answers.
While it may be expected that a respondent reading a beauty magazine prior to the survey may have responses that are indicative of a lower body image at that point in time, we found that some questions show that respondents reading news magazines were actually more inclined to do so. This suggests that at this point in the life of our targeted response group women ages eighteen to twenty-four , magazine depictions may already be internalized, so that those who are negatively affected by female models in magazines will continue to be negatively affected, regardless of the type of magazine they may currently be reading.
It seems that magazines do not affect women immediately but it is a slow process that causes the women to have a lower body image. A reason we may not have found significant data may be because we only had a group of twelve women. These women may be a group of very self-aware women and may have already come to terms with their bodies.
It may also have been a discriminating factor that the subjects were all friends of the researchers. For example, Cusumano and Thompson discovered that internalization of social norms of appearance accounted for significant and substantial variance, whereas exposure to magazines did not.
Once again, our data did not find these statements to be true, at least among the majority of our sample population. Many of the college-age women acknowledged that they would like to look like female magazine models, but they did not feel the models had a direct impression on their own body image and self-esteem. Earlier the internalization process was discussed and our research team hypothesized that this process may be an underlying factor in many of the women in our study.
Although our data seems to be leaning toward this finding, it is unable to be a conclusive finding to our study because internalization is unable to be proven through the methods that we used. Overall, our study has concluded that magazine models do not influence women's body image or self-esteem. Our research group also uncovered that most college-age women never feel as if magazine models have the ideal body shape, but despite this, many college-age women still strive to attain this unrealistic ideal.
Why is there such pressure to make models increasingly thinner, to the point of erasing whole body parts? In recent years there have been some efforts in the magazine industry to buck the trend. In , Aerie pledged not to retouch any of their images used in advertisements for their clothes as a part of their AerieREAL campaign. There is resistance to change, both within and outside the industry.
When the Australian magazine New Woman included a picture of a heavy-set model on its cover, it received a truckload of letters from grateful readers praising the move, but its advertisers complained and the magazine returned to featuring bone-thin models.
Online influencers are another form of advertising and source of body image issues for teens. Some social networks popular with teens have taken steps to address this. Instagram, for example, changed its policies in to stop the promotion of weight loss products and cosmetic procedures.
The impact of advertisements: How female readers in China perceive fashion magazine advertisements and white ski. Kansas State University. University of Minnesota. It also found that for women who wanted to lose weight , more time on Facebook resulted in more disordered eating symptoms. While most studies on social media and body image focus on women, a recent study found similar effects in men.
The study analyzed 1, Instagram posts uploaded by male-identifying persons and evaluated responses — in the form of likes and comments.
Most of the posts depicted muscularity and leanness, and the posts displaying this body type received the highest number of likes and comments. The researchers concluded that these findings are "potentially harmful to men's body image," but more studies are needed to draw definitive conclusions. Negative impacts of social media on body image are well documented, but social media can also have a positive effect on your body image, Chaudhary says.
A Australian study surveyed women between 18 and 30 after viewing body positive content on Instagram. Body positive content seeks to show appreciation and acceptance for all types of bodies. Researchers concluded that after viewing positive content, the women not only felt better about their bodies, but they were also in better moods. Another way social media can positively impact body image is by connecting you with others and building a body-accepting community, Emanuele says.
Social media can negatively affect your body image, mood, and overall mental health, but there are ways to counteract this. You may think you are simply scrolling through social media to unwind, but research has found the images you see and the people you interact with can have an impact on your self-perception.
But, that doesn't mean all social media use is bad. It just means you may need to re-evaluate how you use social media. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.
Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation.
0コメント