Critique III

Grabe, Shelly; Ward, L. Monique; Hyde, Janet Shibley. The Role of the Media in Body Image Concerns among Women: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental and Correlational Studies. Psychological Bulletin; v134 n3 p460-476 May 2008.

The author’s goal is to focus on body image dissatisfaction and related concerns, including behaviors and beliefs about eating and dieting. The authors have found that 50% of American girls and undergraduate women report being dissatisfied with their bodies. These feelings of dissatisfaction is not inconsequential, they have been linked to critical physical and mental health problems. The authors say that girls and young women are dissatisfied with their bodies not just because of parental messages or peer-related teasing but also by the thin ideal dominating the media. Across the media society has thinness consistently emphasized and rewarded for women, with thin television characters are overrepresented while overweight characters are underrepresented. The authors found that media images today have a far greater thinner female model than decades ago, leaving media for young women polluted with extremely thin models that portray and ideal that is unattainable to most.

The authors compiled multiple studies together to “examine the connections between media use and women’s body image and related issues that have been experimental laboratory studies that examine whether exposure to thin-ideal media increases body dissatisfaction or related concerns in the short term”. The author’s research found that media exposure is linked to women’s generalized dissatisfaction with their bodies, the increased investment in appearance and the increased endorsement of disordered eating behaviors. The effects are present across multiple outcomes and are demonstrated in both the experimental and correlational literatures. In the end they found that media exposure appears to be related to women’s body image negatively regardless of assessment technique, individual difference variables, media type, age, or other idiosyncratic study characteristics.

This article is great because it compiles multiple studies on the effects of media on women and their body dissatisfaction, it pretty much does most of the grunt work for someone looking into the effects of media images and women. This gives my research a great base, showing that media does affect women and their dissatisfaction of their body and body image. It also brings about short and long term problems that can be the outcome of the media exposure.

It is interdisciplinary because it incorporates multiple studies and forms of experiments, taking them and putting them in to one comprehensive article, allowing the article to be passed among multiple disciplines, media education, health classes, women’s studies and sociology.