Medicina Comunitária e Educação em Saúde

Abstrato

Media Influence on the Body Image Among Students in UAE

Jayadevan Sreedharan, Anne Antony, Shakaib Qureshi, Sakia Fazal, Hisham Siddiqui, Juel Choudhury, Pervaiz Aslam, Elsheba Mathew, Rizwana B Shaikh and Shatha Al-Sharbatti

Objectives: This study intended to determine the degree of influence of the media on the body image of students in the United Arab Emirates.
Materials and methods: This cross-sectional survey collected data from 372 school and college students residing in UAE (129 males, 243 females) using a self-administered questionnaire. The data collected included sociodemographic characteristics, height, weight, social factors, and influence of different media on perceived body image. Data was entered on Microsoft Excel and analyzed on PASW 18.0 version using chi-square test for association and data presented as descriptive statistics.
Results: Twenty eight percent of the study group reported media to be the most influential factor on perception of appearance, of which internet was found to be the most influential medium (47.3% males and 42% females) on body image, followed by television (31% males and 37% females). Media were not as important as “attitude of family” (37.4%), “attitude of the opposite sex” (36.9%) or “attitude of friends/peers” (34.7%) which ranked highest among the most influencing factors. Media were considered moderately influencing (37.4%), with the other factors having almost equal importance. Media had effect only on the emotional and cognitive aspects. It was found that no single factor among the tested influential factors had a great impact on the body image of the youth of UAE, though there were several moderately influencing factors of almost equal importance. The overweight participants considered media to have ‘strong influence’ (p<0.06) which was not statistically significant.
Conclusion: Peers, family, and those of opposite gender were found to have more influence on body image than media. However, internet was the most influential media for both males and females and so may be used for educating all the influential persons in this regard.