Abstract
Television consumption influences perceptions of attractive female body size. However, cross-cultural research examining media influence on body ideals is typically confounded by differences in the availability of reliable and diverse foodstuffs. 112 participants were recruited from 3 Nicaraguan villages that differed in television consumption and nutritional status, such that the contribution of both factors could be revealed. Participants completed a female figure preference task, reported their television consumption, and responded to several measures assessing nutritional status. Communities with higher television consumption and/or higher nutritional status preferred thinner female bodies than communities with lower television consumption and/or lower nutritional status. Bayesian mixed models estimated the plausible range of effects for television consumption, nutritional status, and other relevant variables on individual preferences. The model explained all meaningful differences between our low-nutrition villages, and television consumption, after sex, was the most likely of these predictors to contribute to variation in preferences (probability mass >95% when modelling only variables with zero-order associations with preferences, but only 90% when modelling all possible predictors). In contrast, we found no likely link with nutritional status. We thus found evidence that where media access and nutritional status are confounded, media is the more likely predictor of body ideals.
Highlights
Previous research has shown that the media, in particular television, can influence what people regard as an attractive female body, often with negative consequences for body satisfaction and self-esteem[1,2,3,4,5]
A series of ANOVAs and Tukey post hoc comparisons were used to investigate differences between locations on the control variables
There were no significant differences between locations in terms of acculturation (F2, 104 = 2.68, p = 0.073), Body Mass Index (BMI) (F2, 103 = 1.41, p = 0.247), and Waist to Hip Ratio (WHR) (F2, 103 = 0.02, p > 0.250)
Summary
Previous research has shown that the media, in particular television, can influence what people regard as an attractive female body, often with negative consequences for body satisfaction and self-esteem[1,2,3,4,5]. The current study is the first to investigate the effect of media consumption on female body weight ideals while incorporating a comprehensive assessment of nutritional factors such as food insecurity, diet quality, current hunger, and participants’ actual BMI. We drew from the same region as Boothroyd et al.[14] and selected three indigenous communities located around the Pearl Lagoon basin in Eastern Nicaragua These three communities (hereafter Village A, Village B, and Village C) are predominantly of the same ethnic group (Garifuna) and share very similar cultural and environmental constraints with two important exceptions: Village A and Village B have access to television (since the year 2006 and 2009, respectively) whereas Village C has not, and Village A has better food supplies than both Village B and Village C. The communities selected represented three levels or combinations of television consumption and nutritional status: Village A had high TV access with high nutritional status, Village B had high TV access with low nutritional status, and Village C had low TV access with low nutritional status (Table 1)
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