Abstract
There has been an increase in research that focuses on female adolescents and adult women concerns relating to body image and dieting concerns. However, research on body and dieting concerns of specifically pre-adolescents is still a neglected area of research in comparison with female adolescents and adult women. Pre-adolescents are either research participants as part of a group, which includes younger children, or part of a group of adolescents. This article addresses the body and dieting concerns of pre-adolescent females as a group on their own. A qualitative study was conducted, and data were collected by using a vignette with semi-structured questions. The data were analysed by using a thematic analysis. The results indicated that although the girls presented a ‘polite’ discourse that all girls should be accepted irrespective of weight, when they were futher engaged with during the interviews this was not reflective of their world view. Negative attributes were projected onto the heavier girl in the vignette, and the discourse of acceptance was linked to feelings of pity and sympathy as fat girls were ‘handicapped’ albeit not because of their own doing. Thin girls were linked to positive traits, such as kind, happy and with leadership potential. The pre-teens in the sample were all very familiar with terms related to food restrictions (dieting), and a number of them had indulged in dieting behaviour to lose weight. The research was conducted in one province in South Africa and provides baseline data for a bigger study, which includes other provinces, as well as girls from rural areas and girls from schools in poorer urban areas. The results indicated that the pre-teen girls have internalised gendered notions of what it means to be female and being thin is integrally linked to what patriarchy has constructed as the ideal female body.Contribution: This article is grounded within the discipline of Psychology. However, the scholarly contribution it intersects with include the disciplines of Public Health, Education and Gender Studies. It provides and engages a discourse at the intersections of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines, contributing to knowledge which is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary.
Highlights
Over the past four decades, a body of work has emerged, which advocates that the views that children and adolescents hold regarding the body image are moulded in their early childhood
Body image has multiple definitions, but there is a general understanding that it refers to our feelings, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions, which we have about our bodies
This is as an ‘appearance culture’ (Tregels & Eggermont 2017), which puts immense importance on the thin body, and a thin person is predominantly viewed in a positive light
Summary
Over the past four decades, a body of work has emerged, which advocates that the views that children and adolescents hold regarding the body image are moulded in their early childhood. Girl children in western settings are from a very young age exposed to a discourse that being labelled as pretty, cute and generally physically attractive will translate into being happy, clever and wealthy. This is as an ‘appearance culture’ (Tregels & Eggermont 2017), which puts immense importance on the thin body, and a thin person is predominantly viewed in a positive light. There is a recognition of the paucity of studies in the area dedicated to childhood (Neves et al 2017) This group of ‘tweens’ is the focus of the research in this article. Much of the research has been conducted in urban settings, but there has been an increase in research conducted in rural settings (Pedro et al 2016)
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