The Role of Gender and Religiosity in Positive Body Image Development Among Adolescents in Germany

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Notes

¹E.g., Ambwani and Strauss 2007; Hargreaves and Tiggemann 2004.

²See Argyle and Beit-Hallahmi 1975; Stark 2008; Collett and Lizardo 2009; see Sullins 2006 for exceptions.

³See Hood, Hill, and Spilka.

⁴See Hood, Hill, and Spilka.

⁵See Cash and Pruzinsky 2002.

⁶See Blood 2005.

⁷See Blood 2005.

⁸See Williams et al. 2004; Avalos et al. 2005.

⁹See Rodin et al. 1985.

¹⁰See Boyatzis et al. 2006.

¹¹See Pargament 1997.

¹²See Huber 2008, 2009.

¹³See Glock 1962; Stark and Glock 1968.

¹⁴See Huber 2009.

¹⁵See Roberts and Davidson 1984.

¹⁶See Smith et al. 2003; Mussap 2009.

¹⁷The VROID-MHAP study was funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation (SNF) as part of the National Research Programme (NRP) 58 entitled Religion, State and Society. See Käppler et al. 2011 for a more detailed description of the VROID-MHAP study.

¹⁸The results presented here include only the data collected in Germany. This is due to the fact that questions about the body were only included in the questionnaire-based study in Germany.

¹⁹At the first point of data collection, 896 adolescents participated. From the first sample, 662 adolescents (74%) participated again one year later.

²⁰Some of the adolescents who were recruited in religious organizations were one to two years younger than the youngest cohort or one year older than the oldest cohort.

²¹Germany's school system is divided into several different types/levels of secondary school. The three levels of school are the Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium (the highest level of secondary school education).

²²See Huber 2008.

²³See Avalos et al. 2005; German version: Swami et al. 2008.

²⁴The 13th item of the Body Appreciation Scale includes a version for females and a version for males: “I do not allow unrealistically thin images of women presented in the media to affect my attitudes toward my body” and “I do not allow unrealistically muscular images of men presented in the media to affect my attitudes toward my body.” We chose to exclude this item because we did not feel it was fitting for our age group and because we wanted to only have one version of the questionnaire for both boys and girls.

²⁵Other regression analyses predicting body related aspects of religiosity revealed much higher degrees of explained variance but cannot be presented here due to the limitations of space of the present article.

²⁶Due to the small sample sizes of some of the religious affiliations, only Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and those without a religious affiliation were included in this analysis.