Research on Body Image Across Race & Culture

I think that as we're growing up, we have an idea that science is black and white or right and wrong.  But in my experience, the world of science is more gray than that.  It's like someone comes up with a new idea, and then we have to test it over a period of years before it's accepted as something of a fact.  

Not only that, but when researchers publish their findings in studies, there is a certain quality that is expected from this kind of writing (otherwise the research isn't considered to be very high quality by other researchers).  And that means that new research that comes out can be difficult to read or interpret.  

So I want to go through a new bit of research and put it into more layman's terms.  So that it's easier to process and digest.

The research that I want to look at was published in the June 2019 edition of Social Work Research, and the article itself is titled "Toward an Understanding of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Body Image among Women."  

And I wanted to take a look at this particular article because our body image has a huge impact on our life, whether we realize it or not.  It can impact our self-esteem and mental health in general, which can snowball into other things in our lives, like how we communicate and the quality of our relationships.  Our body image and self-esteem can cause traumatic events in our lives.  Because trauma is all about how we process something, not about the event itself.  

Different social groups, like ethnicities, and different cultures have different values, or different things that they believe are important.  These values are what make every group of people different, because we base all of our decisions on our values.  So our values impact everything from what partners we're more likely to choose to what foods we're more likely to cook.  So these values are what make each culture around the world different.  And this idea applies to beauty too.  So different cultures and different social groups have different ideas of what is most important to them when it comes to beauty.  Some cultures could value hair or eyes or even certain skin tones.  And all of this impacts how we see our own bodies and our body image.

This study aimed to understand how women who identify as African American, white, Asian American, Latina, and multiracial by answering two questions:

1. How do favorite and least favorite body parts vary by race and ethnicity

2. How do body appreciation, skin tone satisfaction, body size, and weight perception vary by race and ethnicity (Winter, Danforth, Landor, & Pevehouse-Pfeiffer, 2019)?

The study looked at women ages 18 through 56, with most of the women being between the ages of 18 and 25 years old.  The data was collected through surveys that were sent out via Reddit, a popular social media website, during the summer of 2016 (Winter et al., 2019).  

When doing research, the more people in the study, the better.  The more people involved in the research, the more likely the research is accurate and not reflecting some small percentage of what could be happening.  

In this study, about 27.6% of the participants identified as white, 22.9% identified as Asian American, 19.1% identified as African American, 17.3% identified as multiricial, and 13.1% identified as Latina (Winter et al., 2019).  There appears to be a decent amount of women from each ethnicity that participated in this study.  With research like this, we not only want a large sample size overall, but we want one that has a decent sample size for each group  of people that we're looking at.  Otherwise it's hard to say that our conclusions are worthwhile, if we only involved a small amount of people.  

Most of the questions that were asked of participants used some version of a 1-5 rating system.  Questions about body appreciation, skin tone, and weight perception had questions that were rated similar to this.  When asking about favorite/least favorite body parts/features, researchers asked participants to choose body parts and features from a list.  BMI was calculated from the participants reported height and weight.  And participants were able to report their race/ethnicity from a list, and if they chose more than one they were classified as multiracial (Winter et al., 2019).

The favorite body part was eye color for white women, lip thickness for black women, and hair overall for Latino and Asian American women.  Stomach and abs were the most reported least favorite body part and feature across the board.  Black women reported the highest body appreciation with white women reporting the lowest.  Latina women reported the highest skin tone satisfaction.  Women who identified as black had the highest reported BMI and women who identified as Asian had the lowest reported BMI (Winter et al., 2019).

Something to keep in mind with this research, is that it is one of many when it comes to body image.  So it is not a end all be all.

But when we think of body image, something that the researchers comment on is that there are sort of traditional body image concerns, like body size and shape.  And this research suggests that depending on our cultural or ethnic norms and values, our standards of beauty may include more than that.  Like our hair or lips.  And what is important to us, in terms of beauty, is shaped by our culture and ethnicity (Winter et al., 2019).

I think that when we're considering body image and self-esteem, it is common to think about times when we've shamed ourselves because of our overall body shape.  Or when we've been shamed by others.  But this study does bring up a good point, that there are other values that could bring up other aspects of our image that could be just as important, or more important to us.  And those things are also important to consider.

Winter, V. R., Danforth, L. K., Landor, A., & Pevehouse-Pfeiffer, D. (2019). Toward an Understanding of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Body Image among Women. Social Work Research, 43(2), 65-128.