Body area dissatisfaction in white, black and Latina female college students in the USA: an examination of racially salient appearance areas and ethnic identity

Abstract

Dissatisfaction with one's physical appearance is rampant among women living in western cultures. However, little research has examined dissatisfaction with body areas that may be more salient to racial-minority groups (e.g., hair, eyes, skin colour). This study examined dissatisfaction with racially salient appearance areas and ethnic identity in self-identified black (n=76), white (n=104) and Latina (n=106) female college students in the southern USA. Results revealed that Latina women reported significantly more dissatisfaction with their eyes and nose than white and black women. Additionally, white and Latina women reported significantly more dissatisfaction with their facial features, lips, lower body and overall body than black women. Stronger ethnic identity predicted lower levels of body dissatisfaction on most appearance areas for all women. These results suggest that social scientists should consider racially salient appearance areas in the measurement and conceptualization of body dissatisfaction in ethnically diverse women.

Keywords:

• body dissatisfaction
• racially salient appearance areas
• ethnic identity
• race
• female college students
• eating pathology

Acknowledgements

This project was funded, in part, by a dissertation grant from the American Psychological Association, Minority Fellowship Program: Grant 1 T06 SM56564-01.

Notes

1. Items were written to be very specific. For example, instead of asking one's degree of satisfaction with their ‘eyes’, items asked about aspects of the eye that are believed to be related to race (e.g. eye shape, whether the eye has a double or epicanthic fold, eye colour, distance between eyes). The aim was to create items that maintained the eight basic categories of appearance features (represented as subscales) with at least two items in each subscale. During a research training seminar of the American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship Program, a prominent eating disorder researcher and three doctoral-level graduate students who study cross-cultural aspects of body image in racially and ethnically diverse women critiqued, reviewed and edited the items.

2. Kaiser's (1974) measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) determined whether the data were appropriate for factor analysis. MSA values at or above 0.80–0.90 are considered sufficient for analysis, whereas those ranging from 0.50–0.60 are poor, and any values under 0.50 are considered unacceptable (Kaiser 1974). Items with poor individual MSA values were sequentially removed from the scale. This was done by identifying the item with the lowest individual MSA below 0.75, removing it from the scale, and repeating the process until all individual-item MSAs were above 0.75. After removing three items due to poor MSA values, the total MSA of the scale was 0.87.

3. Although undesirable to have any subscale α below 0.70 (i.e. the Skin subscale fell below this threshold), given the salience of skin colour to race, the subscale was retained. Consequently, all eight subscales were retained as theoretically derived. Consequently, all eight subscales were retained as theoretically derived. Future researchers could use items with the SAT-R with only two subscales: one ‘face’ and one ‘body’. When separated into two subscales, α values improved: the sixteen-item Body subscale (which included all hair, skin, body areas and buttocks items) had a subscale α of 0.84 and the twelve-item Face subscale (which included all nose, facial structure, eyes and lips items) yielded an α of 0.88.

4. Multiple fit indices tested model fit, including the Satorra-Bentler χ2 (SB; Satorra and Bentler 2001), Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI; Jöreskog and Sörbom 1993), Normed Fit Index (NFI; Bentler and Bonett 1980), Comparative Fit Index (CFI; Bentler 1990), Non-Normed Fit Index or Tucker-Lewis Index (NNFI; Marsh, Balla and McDonald 1988), Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR; Jöreskog and Sörbom 1993) and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA; Browne and Cudeck 1993). According to Hu and Bentler (1999), values of the GFI, NFI, CFI and NNFI range from 0 to 1.0, with values 0.95 or greater indicating a close fit and 0.90 an acceptable fit. Conversely, values of the RMSEA range from 0 to 1.0 and values close to 0.05 indicate a close fit, 0.08 an adequate fit, and 0.10 or greater a poor fit of the data to the model. For the SRMR, values also range from 0 to 1.0, with values close to 0.06 indicating a close fit. Overall, goodness of fit indices were very strong (SBχ² (df=436)=972.74, NFI=0.93, NNFI=0.96, CFI=0.96, GFI=0.80, RMSEA=0.06). Standardized inter-factor correlations ranged from 0.32 (Hair and Face subscales) to 0.71 (Skin and Body subscales).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cortney S. Warren

CORTNEY S. WARREN is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.