Waterloo research finds 55 per cent of teens feel dissatisfied with their appearance
A new study by University of Waterloo researchers found that the majority of young people on social media were dissatisfied with their bodies. Researchers say this is a global issue.
Negative body image, or body dissatisfaction, occurs when a person has persistent negative thoughts and feelings about their body and is associated with poor psychological and physical health, especially in young people, according to similar studies.
The study found that 55 per cent of adolescents from a sample of 21,277 youth aged 10 to 17 years old from Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States expressed dissatisfaction with their bodies, which increased with more social media screen time.
Approximately 35 per cent of the teens reported being “larger than ideal” and 20 per cent said they were “thinner than ideal.”
University of Waterloo School of Public Health Sciences researchers used a drawing that depicted eight body images of increasing weight to determine what would be perceived as an ideal body type. The adolescents were asked to choose which picture looked most like their own body shape and which looked most like how they would want their body to look.
Figural drawing scales displaying body images of increasing weight. Adapted from Stunkard and colleagues and Growing Up Today Study 1998 Questionnaire.
Platforms where users share videos or images of themselves or others were found to be more highly associated with body dissatisfaction than text-based platforms, like X (formerly Twitter). Social media use was assessed by measuring time spent online and platforms used.
“Depending on sociodemographics and how they use social media, teens can be dissatisfied for different reasons,” said the study’s lead author and Waterloo PhD candidate Karen Hock. “There was a greater rate of dissatisfaction among YouTube and Snapchat users versus non-users, and we found differences in dissatisfaction based on country, age, ethnicity and weight-based teasing.”
Dissatisfaction with one’s body was prevalent across all countries, particularly in that the youth felt “larger than ideal.”
Though studies often focus on female body dissatisfaction, Hock’s team discovered that dissatisfaction was also prevalent among males. Those who reported dissatisfaction with being thinner than they believed ideal were mostly males, and the opposite was found for females.
Hock said that more research is needed that incorporates the findings of minority gender or transgender youth who also experience body dissatisfaction.
Despite the recent uptick of body positivity published in the media, Hock says more needs to be done to support these children who are using social media and developing an unhealthy relationship with body image.
“Previous research has found that youth know using social media is not good for their mental health, but they find it really hard to stop,” Hock said.
Research shows that media literacy programs can help reduce body dissatisfaction and teach adolescents to understand that the images they see on social media are not always real.
Hock also expressed the need for policy change around social media algorithms to prevent users from being shown content that makes them feel poorly about how they look.
The study was recently published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
