cross cultural exploration of body image

Today's class got me thinking about the idea of body image in respect to different cultures and countries through out the world. Last year I read an interesting article that I thought fit perfectly with what we were discussing in class today. Eating behaviors and attitudes following prolonged exposure to television among ethnic Fijian adolescent girls is an article published in the British Journal of Psychiatry by Becker, Burwell, Gilman, Herzog and Hamburg pertaining directly to the relationship between television and body dissatisfaction. The main hypothesis of this study focused on how despite local Fijian beliefs that full-bodied figures and appetites are normal, the influence of Western television in 1998 set a trend towards disordered eating patterns and negative body images in adolescent women when compared to data collected in 1995 when television did not exist.  Further, the researchers believed that a negative body image could be represented by both a high EAT-26 score (eating attitudes test, higher than a score of 20) and induced vomiting. The research indicated findings on two fields, first, 12.7% of the subjects in 1995 had high EAT scores, compared to 29.2% in 1998, thus the percentage dramatically increased when television was introduced. Also no participants reported self-induced vomiting in 1995 but 11.3% did in 1998. The authors also found subjects were three times more likely to have a high EAT-26 score when living in a home that had access to television. Eighty-three percent of the girls felt that television influenced their peers and themselves to change their body shape and weight. All participants mentioned ways that exposure to television manipulated their customary behavior or beliefs (Becker, Burwell, Gilman, Herzog & Hamburg, 2002). Despite that this research did not take place in the United States, it showed the dangerous effects of Western social media exposure.