“They Perpetuate Toxic Beauty Standards”: Youths' Perceptions of Body Challenges

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Body dissatisfaction is prevalent in adolescence, particularly for American girls (Bucchianeri et al., 2013). The era of social media poses new threats to youths’ body image because content is frequently uploaded, highly visual, and mostly made up of people they know which allows for easier targets to compare themselves to (Sherlock & Wagstaff, 2018). Previous research has examined the negative effects of various social media platforms on body image and disordered eating behaviors (Cohen, Newton-John, & Slater, 2017; Saunders & Eaton, 2018). However, no work has been conducted on body challenges, defined as a trend where an individual checks if his/her body can look a certain way to pass the specific challenge (e.g., the paper challenge: holding a piece of 8x11 paper vertically to your waist to see if you are smaller than the width of the paper). These challenges may be harmful to adolescents’ body image due to how they often endorse the thin ideal, leading adolescents to feel dissatisfied with their bodies if they cannot pass the challenge.

To explore this new phenomenon, we examined the perceptions of female and gender-expansive adolescent/emerging adults on body challenges. We asked the open-ended question via text message, “What do you think about these trending body challenges?” 144 participants (Mage = 19, SD = 2.84) listed accurate body challenges and therefore were included in this analysis. Participants were majority White (72%).

A two-phase qualitative analysis proposed by Charmaz (2014) was used. The first phase involved quickly pulling out interesting pieces from each response. The second phase involved creating codes based on those pieces and going back to assign each response one or more codes. This phase also involved reworking and reorganizing codes if needed. The codes then arose to become overall themes of the responses. Simple percentages were then calculated to represent the percent of participants who fit each theme and was a form of validation. Major themes revealed that youth thought body challenges were toxic (61.8%), ridiculous (35.4%), and unhealthy (12.5%). Some youth had mixed feelings (4.2%) or thought body challenges were good (3.5%). Other present themes included anti-feminist/social commentary (4.9%) and the need for body positivity (4.9%). See Table 1 for sample responses.

These results reveal perceptions of body challenges, showing how the majority of girls and gender-expansive youth do not view body challenges as beneficial for body image, health, and well-being. These perceptions are interesting in the context of body challenges going viral and trending on social media, suggesting their popularity and engagement. Although youth hold negative views, they may still participate in body challenges and/or feel their effects. Future work should further explore body challenges, examining why they go viral despite youth believing they are harmful as well as experimentally testing how they affect one’s body image. Knowledge and understanding of body challenges may aid in prevention and intervention strategies so that youth become resilient to the potentially harmful effects of body challenges they see on social media.

Authors

• Kerrie Leonard, North Dakota State University
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth H. Blodgett Salafia, North Dakota State University
  Non-Presenting Author