Abstract
This study examines how youth collectively represent fatness and determines the emotions it arouses. Understanding how fatness is socially constructed by young people is crucial to create programs that better deal with it. A free association exercise elicited by the word "fatness" was answered by 200 people of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (Spain), and the content was analyzed by its lexicon using Alceste software. The results showed that health-related representation of fatness was mostly descriptive, and it was not connected to risky or any emotional response. But fatness was also completely represented as a social pressure issue related to stigmatization and highly correlated with negative emotions, such as sadness, insecurity, embarrassment, anguish, lonesomeness, pity or anger. That is, risky and negative emotions were linked to social non-acceptance, and not with health problems. Thus, the conclusion is that fatness is transmitted from fear and not from a positive construction of the health.
Highlights
This study examines how youth collectively represent fatness and determines the emotions it arouses
The shared representations about fatness are examined focusing on the free association exercise results, and the emotional response, associated with those representations, is specified
Some of the most relevant elementary contextual units (ECUs) argue that fitting or not fitting well in clothes is what makes them feel fat or not, and whether their “regular clothes” fit them properly or not: “What most infuriates me is that my friends and I feel fat because clothes sizes in the regular stores are becoming smaller
Summary
This study examines how youth collectively represent fatness and determines the emotions it arouses. In Western society, obesity has become an unstoppable epidemic and has direct social implications This is one of the most concerning issues, among young people 1. From the perspective of social representations, beyond scientific knowledge about an issue (overweight in our case), people understand and share common ideas through social representations. Previous research has pointed out that, on one hand, overweight is socially represented as a health problem mainly related to a sedentary lifestyle and a bad nutrition 4. On the other hand, it is represented in aesthetic terms, in which beauty suffers as weight increases, reducing a person’s attractiveness 5 This aesthetic issue has its impact among young people, for whom fitting or not fitting into their clothes dictates whether they feel fat or not [6,7]
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