Race and Female Body Image essays

Race and Female Body Image essays The topic that we chose to research was race and female body image. We only researched African American women and Caucasian women because we wanted to see the contrast of the two. One of our hypotheses was that there would be a difference in the way women of different races perceived our bodies. Further, we hypothesized that African American women would have a more positive outlook on body image than Caucasian women did. Another hypothesis was that African American women that grew up with peers of the same ethnicity would have a more positive body image. Also, African American women that grew up with peers of a different ethnicity were predicted to have a more negative outlook on body image. The first aspect of body image we tested was how often our respondents thought about their weight. Of the 60 respondents, after running a crosstabulation between race and how often women thought about their weight, 36.7 percent of them thought about their weight often and 36.7 percent of them thought about their weight on occasion. The majority, 73.4 percent, were in these two categories (on occasion and often). When breaking the demographic of race down between the women, there was a difference in how often each race thought about their weight. 20 percent of the African American women reported that they thought about their weight virtually never, 40 percent reported they thought about their weight on occasion, and 25.7 percent said they thought about their weight often. With the Caucasian women, there were zero reports that they thought about their weight virtually never with 32 percent reporting they think about their weight on occasion and the majority, 52 percent reportin g they think about their weight often (table 1.2). What these percentages tell us is that there are fewer Caucasian women that think about their weight virtually never and more that think about their weight often than those reported by the African American women....