Television and Perceived Peer Expectations of Body Size Among African American Adolescent Girls

ABSTRACT

Survey data collected from 61 African American adolescent girls explored body mass index as a moderator of the relationship between girls' ideal-body television exposure and their perceptions of how same-sex peers expect them to look. For larger-bodied girls, ideal-body television viewing predicted the belief that female peers expect them to be smaller. For smaller-bodied girls, ideal-body television viewing predicted the belief that female peers expect them to be larger. These findings point to a moderate body size ideal for African American girls and are consistent with assumptions underlying the influence of presumed influence model and the mainstreaming process outlined in cultivation theory.

KEYTERMS:

• television
• peers
• body
• African American
• adolescents
• girls

We thank the school administrators, teachers, and students who volunteered their time and services for this study; and Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, Anne Koivunen, Jessica Layne, Monica Potter, Layne Sakwa, and Maria-Christina Stewart for help collecting data.

Notes

Note. BMI = body mass index.

∗p < .05.

1. Scores of participants who provided both height and weight data were compared to those of participants who declined to provide either height or weight data, for the following variables: age, ideal-body television viewing, peer expectations to be larger, and peer expectations to be smaller. There was only one significant difference: girls who declined to report personal height or weight data scored significantly higher on the measure of perceived peer expectations to be smaller (M = 0.53, SD = 0.75) than girls who did provide their height and weight (M = 0.18, SD = 0.39), t(112) = 3.17, p < .01. This suggests that girls who declined to supply body-size data regarded themselves as larger in the eyes of their peers than did girls who were willing to volunteer this information.

2. We needed the self-viewpoint lists to compare to the peer-viewpoint lists because our goal was to count words or phrases that indicated perceived peer expectations to have a larger or smaller body than one already has. The sample peer-viewpoint term “skinnier,” for instance, needs no comparison; the comparative form of the adjective itself implies that the adolescent writing it thinks her peers expect her to be skinnier (than she is). However, the sample peer-viewpoint term “petite” does not in itself imply a comparison; it leaves us uncertain of whether the participant writing it thinks her peers expected her to be more petite than she is; thus, we seek a comparison in the self-viewpoint list. If the peer-viewpoint list features the word “petite” and the actual list features the word “big,” then we know that the participant in question thinks her peers expect her body to be smaller than it is.

3. In addition to raw counts, we calculated the smallness and largeness variables as proportions of total words listed. Use of the proportional data made no difference in the analyses, so we opted to retain the raw data for ease of interpretation. The average smallness score was .18 (SD = .39), with 50 of the girls listing no references to smallness and 11 listing one reference. The average largeness score was .31 (SD = .67), with 48 of the girls listing no references to largeness, 8 listing one reference, 4 listing two, and 1 listing three. One might expect that larger-bodied girls would only list smallness references and smaller-bodied girls only largeness references, thereby limiting variance, but BMI was only mildly correlated with smallness (r = .14, p > .10) and largeness (r = − .11, p > .10). Splitting the sample at the median for BMI revealed that 3 of the higher-BMI girls (N = 29) listed references to largeness, whereas 2 of the lower-BMI girls (N = 32) listed references to smallness. Thus, there was adequate variance for analyses that involved splitting the sample into lower- and higher-BMI groups.