Sociocultural is a combination of social and cultural effects. In today’s society, children are bombarded with constant exposure to the media in many different ways such as television, magazines, radio, newspaper, movies, and more recently the internet. Adolescence is a time of physical growth, hormonal change, physical growth, and changes in the body mass and shape. Media is more significant during early adolescent due to social and emotional process, such as personal identity development, increasing peer pressure, and striving for personal uniqueness through experimentation (Steinberg, 1987). For adolescence, television serves as an important part of socialization as they begin to veer off from their parents and become reliant on the opinions of their peers. This need for acceptance by their peers leads to isolation of the child’s actually personality in school which they hide for acceptance to feel a sense of belonging and this can lead to unhealthy behaviors. In a questionnaire that was distributed to 508 seventh and eighth graders “more than half of participants (54.73% indicated that they wish they were thinner than their current state” (Eyal, 2013). At the end of this study it provided support to the social comparison theory, by showing that media exposure is related to motivations to self-compare with mediated characters, which increases social comparison proves leading to actual/ideal body shape discrepancy, and in turn to lowered body image perceptions (Eyal, 2013). In another case study a sample 356 girls from ages 9 to 12 years were tested on the effects of reading magazines. Many reported that magazines portrayed a thin ideal, as well as an awareness of a standard for acceptance. “Thinness is promoted as a standard for female beauty, and the images presented by the media of the so-called ideal shape have become progressively thinner in recent years”. (Lawrie, 2006). Adolescents are vulnerable to the messages that the media portrays, and they become accustomed to the images conveyed. The degree to which body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms are culturally bound issues connected to and caused by media portrayals of thin ideals continues to be an issue of debate and contention (Ferguson,
1965). In contribution, to media effects it is important to consider the contribution of risk factors such as peer pressure. Evidence has linked body dissatisfaction and eating pathology to peer and parental influences. In Fergusons study of body dissatisfaction in teen he stated, “Arguably social media potentially may have more of an influence than television, given that social media involves interaction with other human beings, rather than fictional images” (Ferguson, 1965). Any form of media has shown to decrease an adolescents overall sense of self and they become more conscious and insecure of their body. They try to achieve perfection but fail and in the end harm themselves. |