Fashion Magazines and Body Image

5339 Words11 Pages

Fashion Magazines and Body Image

Research indicates that exposure to thin ideal images in women's magazines is associated with heightened concerns for body shape and size in a number of young women, although the media's role in the psychopathology of body image disturbance is generally believed to be mediated by personality and socio-cultural factors. The purpose of this research study is to know and gather solid facts and reasons about fashion magazines affecting the teenagers’ body image in a form of research to self evaluation through careful accumulation of acceptable data and relevant resources for such data to be precise and spontaneous in its respected details to support results.

Few studies have explored mediating processes through which media exposure and use contribute to development and perpetuation of eating-disordered cognitions. The other purpose of this study was to test a structural equation model that incorporates several mediating processes through which women's beauty, fashion, health, and fitness magazines might influence the fear of being fat. This study complements previous models by exploring the potential direct and indirect effects of two additional mediating influences: "hope" and the internalized belief that men expect women to be thin.

Theoretical Background

The emergence of the slender body type as a beauty standard for women is especially salient in the mass media, and several researchers have demonstrated how the female body depicted in the media has become increasingly thin (Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz, & Thompson, 1980; Ogletree, Williams, Raffeld, Mason, & Fricke, 1990; Silverstein, Perdue, Peterson, & Kelly, 1986; Wiseman, Gray, Mosimann, & Ahrens...

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... Humor," 1015.

Jakobsson et al., "Establishing a Swedish Instrument," 136.

Snyder et al., "The Will and the Ways," 581-83; Westburg, "Hope and Humor," 1015.

Louis. A. Gottschalk, "Hope and Other Deterrents to Illness," America Journal of Psychotherapy 39 (October 1985): 515-25; Scioli et al., "A Prospective Study of Hope," 729-33; Snyder et al., "The Will and the Ways," 581-83.

Judith Fitzgerald Miller, "Hope," American Journal of Nursing (January/February 1985): 23.

Scioli et al., "A Prospective Study of Hope," 724-25.

Jokes Hermes, Reading Women's Magazines (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995), 29-65.

McCracken, Decoding Women's Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. (NY: St. Martin Press), 135-72.

M. Ferguson, Forever Feminine: Women's Magazines and the Cult of Femininity (London: Heinemann); McCracken, Decoding Women's

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