Aston University Researcher Joins Initiative to Support Young Women in Navigating Body Image Pressures on Social Media
Dr Stephen Pihlaja from Aston University’s School of Social Sciences and Humanities is working with colleagues at the University of Portsmouth to develop a toolkit to give young women the skills and knowledge to cope with potentially harmful social media content.
Led by Dr Helen Ringrow, associate head of the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics at the University of Portsmouth, the project will work with the Portsmouth branch of charity The Girls’ Network, which works to support girls and young women from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Negative body image is a growing concern, particularly with the huge influence of social media. Previous research by a team in Australia led by Macquarie University’s Dr Jasmine Fardouly in 2018 has shown that social media helps young women connect to others and stay informed, but also increases negative perceptions of body image and appearance.
Media, advertising and celebrity culture have been highlighted as important influences on negative body image in reports from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image (2012) and the 2021 House of Commons report into body image. MPs and charities have recognised the need to equip young girls with tools to deal with the sometimes unrealistic and potentially harmful body ideals.
The researchers will introduce girls to historic media content, including 19th and 20th century magazines and adverts, to show them that pressures around female appearance have always existed, and how beauty ideals and body image perceptions have evolved over time.
The researchers will assess young women volunteers’ awareness of how beauty standards are socially, culturally and historically constructed, and with the aid of The Girls’ Network, create a set of young women’s focus groups to develop the new online toolkit. It is expected to be ready in September 2024.
Dr Pihlaja will help to run the focus groups and will provide his expertise on digital communication and social media.
He said:
“I’ve done a lot of work on how people present themselves online, most recently writing about health influencers and how they create the feeling of intimacy with viewers and social media users. This often creates the false sense of personalisation, that the influencer is speaking directly to the viewer. This can be quite dangerous as social media users of all ages are susceptible to this subtle manipulation. Our goal is to learn from users how to best resist these pressures.”