Teenage Girls and Body Image: Classmates Carry More Weight Than Celebrities, Models

Jimmy Fallon recently joked that micro-sized supermodel Kate Moss, whose picture you will find next to the word "skinny" in the dictionary, is going to make her theater debut this summer in Shakespeare's The Tempest. "The play is about a girl stranded on an island with her dad, who uses a magic wand to summon a tempest," said Fallon. "Kate, of course, plays the wand."

To parents of teenage girls Fallon's joke is more frightful than funny. They worry that high profile celebrities like Kate Moss-whose slinky bodies make one wonder if an apple and slice of string cheese comprise their daily diet-may influence their teenage daughters to starve themselves so they can look like the stick thin actresses and models they see glamorized in the movies and fashion magazines.

Teenage Girls Influenced by Peers

Parents can now let Moss and other skinny celebrities off the hook, according to a recent study "Adolescent Girls' Weight Control and Social Comparison in the School Context" published in the March 2010 issue of Journal of Health and Social Behavior that found teenage girls compare their bodies to their peers at school who are similar to them far more than they do media celebrities whom they perceive as being in a different league.

Social Comparison Theory

Although popular wisdom holds that media depictions of ideal weight and body size for women influence teenage girls to become dissatisfied with their bodies and go on calorie restricted diets to lose weight, Social Comparison Theory refutes this. This popular psychological theory posits that people are more likely to compare themselves to "similar others" than to those whom they perceive as either superior or inferior. In the realm of decorating, for instance, one is more likely to compare her house to her neighbor's house than that of Martha Stewart.

In the recent study on teenage girls' perceptions of ideal weight, researchers found when girls attended a school in which more girls had a higher than average body mass index (BMI), fewer girls stated they wanted to lose weight than at schools where more girls had an average BMI. Conversely, at schools that had more girls with a low BMI, a higher than average number of girls stated they wanted to lose weight. Theoretically, teenage girls at both schools would have similar access to media images of very thin models and celebrities to which they could compare themselves.

"What our findings showed was that girls were more aware of what others like them were doing," said lead study author Anna Mueller, a researcher from the University of Texas at Austin.

Teenage Girls Influenced by Peer Pressure

Jeanie Alter, an adolescent health expert with the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University explained the recent study's findings in terms of peer pressure. "It is not surprising that girls' behavior would be influenced by the behaviors of their peers, whether they be perceived or real," said Alter. "This is true for many types of behaviors including risky behaviors, such as substance use. Perceptions that 'everyone is doing it' are powerful motivators."

Teenage Girls with Eating Disorders

Perhaps one exception to the rule of teenage girls comparing themselves to their peers is teenage girls with low self-esteem, a subgroup that often develops eating disorders. These teenage girls tend to compare themselves upward instead of to their peers, a possible subconscious attempt to preserve their negative self-image by comparing themselves to a less attainable ideal

Sources:
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/getDocument.cfm?documentID=22234
http://hsb.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/51/1/64
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/03/17/teen-girls-look-to-peers-as-weight-models/12195.html
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~blechert/pdfs/Blechert%20et%20al%202009-%20Social%20Comparison%20and%20Its%20Relation%20to%20Body%20Dissatisfaction%20in%20Bulimia%20Nervosa%20-%20Evidence%20From%20Eye%20Movements.pdf