#workoutathome: How Instructions in the Captions of Fitfluencers’ Posts Impact Adolescents’ Body Satisfaction and Intention to Exercise

ABSTRACT

The present study examines how content of fitfluencers can be employed to improve body satisfaction and intention to exercise among adolescents. Specifically, this experimental study (N = 114 adolescents, age: 16–18) compares the effects of fitfluencer content with instructional captions that contain exercise or workout instructions (as a form of edutainment) with those of self-focused fitfluencer captions that emphasize the fitfluencer’s appearance. These two types of captions are found to induce no significant differences in either body satisfaction or intention to exercise. In addition, there were no significant indirect effects via state appearance comparison or self-efficacy. The results do show that less state appearance comparisons increase body satisfaction, and that more self-efficacy increases body satisfaction and intention to exercise. The results suggest that instructions in fitfluencer captions do not differ from self-focused captions in their effects on body satisfaction and intention to exercise among adolescents.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Miss Sliwinski for her collaboration on the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data will be made available upon request.

Notes

1. Stimuli have been anonymized due to privacy reasons.

Captions in the stimuli were originally in participants’ native language but have been translated to English for the purpose of this article.

2. “Adapted” means that only relevant items from the original scale were retained.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) under Grant [FWO.OPR.2021.0003.01].