THESIS PROPOSAL
‘The influence and effects of Instagram in regards to body policing on teenage girls who attend international schools in Amsterdam’
- INTRODUCTION
Social media makes it easy for young people to compare themselves to another which in return emphasizes differences and reinforces body policing. An internal Instagram report from March 2020, reveals just how harmful Instagram app is for many teenage girls making body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls. Social media are the domain of peers, and peer comparisons are highly salient to adolescents (Steinberg 2008). A recent survey indicates that the negative associations between participants’ photo browsing, editing behaviors and body esteem were fully mediated by peer appearance comparisons. (Chang, L., et al., 2019). Instagram as a digital platform has gained popularity through image sharing and with images of slim, fit people being displayed on the platform where everyone looks flawless wearing makeup and branded clothes; it emphasizes the objectification of the female body. Self-objectification is a significant social learning factor, the process by which girls and women come to view their bodies as objects to be looked at, much as an observer would (Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997). According to research, especially Western nations struggle with body policing and objectifying of the female body (Jovanovski, 2017). Internalization of “body perfect” ideals and body size stereotypes begin when girls in Western societies are as young as 3 years-old (Dittmar et al., 2006). The direct correlation between perfect images on Instagram and how female teenagers criticize themselves is already extensively researched and it has shown that in the Netherlands there is a direct correlation between perfect images on social media and how females criticize themselves (Van der Deen et al., 2011). However, despite the research and literature regarding this matter and how it has influenced the lives of many teenage girls, still relatively little is known from the perspective of those who are actually using it.
1.1 Problem Field
The objective of this qualitative research is to gain an insight on Gen-Z girls, aged between 13-17, who are engaged in the social media platform Instagram and further delve into how they are experiencing body policing practices as members of the diverse environment present in international schools. There has been extensive research and literature regarding how the prevalence and accessibility of social media has affected the lives of teenage girls, yet relatively little from the perspective of those who are actually using social media. This research will contribute to the existing literature on body policing and the theory of structure and agency. Body policing is a phenomenon that creates a structure where agents, in this case, young teenage girls, operate in. It is of importance for this research to explain the mechanisms of body policing as a social construction consisting of structure and agency to understand how teenage girls are affected by it and how they can react to it. The concept of structure and agency is created by a process called institutionalization (Berger & Luckmann, 1991; Dolfsma & Verburg, 2008; Ybema, 2020). This process consists of four stages: habituation (how I do it), reciprocal typification (how we do it), legitimation (why we do it) and objectification (just the way it is) (Berger & Luckmann, 1991; Ybema, 2020). The way body policing works is through institutionalization and socialization, creating a structure where agents are intertwined. It is a social reality wherein the interaction between agency and structure can be seen as mutually constitutive (Giddens,1984; Dolfsma & Verburg, 2008; Ybema, 2020). A structure of social reality is made through the actions of individuals, though once it has gained enough power, it can start to live a life of its own resulting in unintended consequences such as body policing and objectification of the female’s body (Giddens, 1984; Berger & Luckmann, 1991). This happens because, even if we act with intent, the practices are still situated in a much broader context which enables and constrains human action (Ybema, 2020). And even though it is the work of us humans when the structure is in place, it cannot be torn down or transformed by one agent, therefore it is a recalcitrant instrument (Ybema, 2020). Moreover, even if we feel like we think for ourselves in particular settings, there is still a structure that sets the boundaries for us. However, this does not mean the agent has no power. The power lies in the engagement in the social world. Taking structure and agency theories as a theoretical lens the researcher will try to shed light to how young girls experience events of body policing.
1.2 Research Central Question
The above discussions lead to the central question of this thesis;
‘How do young girls aged 13-17 in international schools in Amsterdam experience the influence of Instagram in regards to body policing?’
Within the concept of body policing, the researcher will particularly focus on the perception of beauty, beauty norms and how these norms lead to peer comparison. The online environment is filled with pictures of peers and opportunities for social comparisons. Negative comparisons can be particularly likely when young girls compare their online pictures with peers, not knowing their peers have digitally altered the photographs (Tiggemann et al. 2014). Internalization of the thinness ideal is one of the many factors that make negative comparisons especially likely. Self-esteem also has been found to play a role in body image effects. Research indicates that low self-esteem is associated with body dissatisfaction in middle-school girls (Mitchell et al. 2012). Young girls who are low in self-esteem or depressed, and for whom thin ideals or appearance-based self-worth is important, are dissatisfied with their bodies (Delinsky 2011). To be able to provide an answer to the central question, semi-structured interviews with participants will be held and if deemed necessary focus groups will be formed out of the interviewees to provide another angle.
In order to answer the research central question, three subsequent questions are formulated going deeper into the relevant sub-topics.
1.2.1 Sub questions
- a) How does body policing work in young girls?
The first sub question sheds light on the norms between young girls on how a body should look like in terms of weight, height, hair type, skin tone including other factors and what is perceived as normal or beautiful. Through conversations with the interviewees the influence of body policing and its effects on them will be uncovered empirically and theoretically and they will have the opportunity to let their voices be heard and to explain to what extent it affects their lives.
- b) How do teenage girls construct and express their identities through Instagram?
The second sub question will seek to further understand the sociology of identity, and how and to what extent Instagram shapes their social interactions, identities or personas they create in their daily lives. Their stories will open a significant window into the role of Instagram in shaping their self-identities and social identities.
- c) In a multicultural environment does use of Instagram hinder the integration of diverse beauties? The third sub question builds upon the second one as the topics are intertwined and provide insight to the cultural differences present in teenagers at international schools and in what ways these differences impact their perception of beauty, which in return shapes their friendship choices and social integration.
- LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Conceptual framework
In this section, an overview of the most important conceptual framework for this research is presented and further explained. Concepts that are of relevance are body policing, diversity, lookism and Instagram, definition and recognition of beauty in different cultures and Gen-Z. With these concepts clarified, the position of this research within the current literature can be understood.
To be able to have a deep understanding of this research, it is significant to understand the meaning of body policing and to clarify what it stands for. Body policing is the informal practice of policing the physical appearance because it does not fit the social norms. The term body policing can for some be known as ‘self-objectification,’ ‘body-consciousness’ or ‘self-policing’ (Fredrickson et al., 1998; McKinley & Hyde, 1996). Body policing shows how the external environment has an effect on the internal self-beliefs of women and how they react upon that (Jovanovski, 2017).
Instagram is completely based on images and the platform has an appearance-focused environment that impacts the behavior of young girls towards each other and the way they perceive themselves or their friends. An internal Instagram presentation from March 2020 seen by the Journal said that when 32% of teenage girls “felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” Research by Thornton and Maurice (1997) shows that no matter if the confidence level or body shape is close to the body ideal, when confronted with images of the body ideal, self-esteem declined and self-awareness increased together with an increase of fear of judgment. Although this study was conducted in 1997, it gives valuable insights by raising concerns as to what the increased supply of body ideal images on social media do to young girls’ self-esteem. The results of a study made by Sherlock, M., & Wagstaff, D.L. (2019) showed that the frequency of Instagram use is correlated with depressive symptoms, self-esteem, general and physical appearance anxiety, and body dissatisfaction and that the relationship between Instagram use and each of these variables is mediated by social comparison orientation. Participants were then exposed to a range of either beauty, fitness, or travel Instagram images. Beauty and fitness images significantly decreased self-rated attractiveness, and the magnitude of this decrease correlated with anxiety, depressive symptoms, self-esteem, and body dissatisfaction. Therefore, excessive Instagram use may contribute to negative psychological outcomes and poor appearance-related self-perception, in line with prior research. The research has implications for interventions and education about chronic Instagram use. Body policing can focus on many physical parts of the human body, however; in this research the main focus will particularly be on the expected looks and body shape of young girls and how they feel the burden of peer pressure regarding their body image.
Diversity, on simple terms is defined as the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, and so on. However, when it comes to defining diversity, it is important to note that there is no single, clear standard for what sufficient diversity looks like.
International schools are environments where extended contact between students from various social and cultural backgrounds takes place on a constant basis. Cultural differences offer opportunities for building walls of separation or bridges of understanding between people. Therefore, the more culturally diverse the environment, the higher the likelihood of walls,
bridges, or both. International schools, which are places of learning that by definition contain high levels of cultural diversity, are hugely relevant to this discussion. (By John L. Lyons 02-Nov-18 , Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Instagram delivers tools that allow teens to earn approval for their appearance and compare themselves to their peers and this especially becomes more apparent in the diverse environment of international schools where most girls have different skin tones, hair, body shapes, or dressing styles. Young girls fall into the illusion of beauty control by using filters or covering up their pimples, whitening their teeth with hopes of curating their own image to become prettier and thinner.
‘Lookism’ is essentially discrimination based on looks. In popular literature, it has been called “beauty prejudice” (Etcoff, 1999, p. 1). The influence of lookism on people in different ages and genders has recently become the focus of many researches. For example, Rumens (2012) found out how this new phenomenon of lookism influences individuals in all age groups. People judge others with a certain pre-ideology on the basis of their attractiveness within seconds of meeting them and the instantaneousness of the lookist response could be due to our need to quickly size up others as friend or enemy, threat or opportunity (Tietje and Cresap, 2005).
This chapter of the research, will look into the concept of lookism in connection with Instagram use, through reviewing the literature on the role of Instagram and how it affects the physical and psychological states of teenage girls; their social interactions, perceptions of themselves and others and how attractiveness varies from one culture to another. Lookism is of high importance when it comes to the physical and mental health in beauty and this study will focus on anxiety, fear of non-acceptability and depression in young teenage girls. Many young girls who are engaged in Instagram on a daily basis are becoming increasingly insecure about their looks due to unrealistic beauty ideals imposed on them. Pew Research Center states that 43% of teens feel pressure to only post content that makes them “look good” to their friends. Most of these beauty standards are unattainable and this exposure to images of perfectly sculpted men and women create mental health issues and identity issues in them. New visual media and technologies, in, virtual reality, corporate image-projection, video games, internet voyeurism and many other developments all in their own ways reinforce the importance of appearances in things and attractiveness in persons (Tietje and Cresap, 2005).
- Definition and recognition of beauty in different cultures
The notion that beautiful-is-good is ingrained in people very early in life (Rubenstein, Kalakanis and Langlois 1999) This section of the research will provide insight into the existence of cultural differences in the perception of beauty by looking deeper into specific cultural values and psychological processes that has an influence on enhancement pursuits of appearance. Norms of beauty are defined by societies and anyone who wishes to be perceived as beautiful, needs to and strives to adhere to these norms (Davis, Sbrocco, Odoms-Young, and Smith 2010; Kim, Young, and Keun 2014). However, the motivation to adhere to societal norms may also depend on the salient cultural values of an individual (Savani et al. 2015). In the domain of beauty, the motivation to conform to societal norms may lead to heightened self-discrepancy between the ideal beauty standards revered by the society and how beautiful women perceive themselves to be. While Easterners gain their sense of worth and satisfaction from belonging to a larger group and adjusting oneself to promote and ensure group harmony; Westerners, gain their sense of worth from being unique and achieving personal goals (Bond and Smith 1996; Markus and Kitayama 1991). In examining the influence of culture on the evaluation of physical attractiveness, the focus can be on identifying cross-cultural differences in what constitutes ‘beauty’ like in the study which showed that East Asians and White Americans value somewhat different beauty traits. (Cunningham et al., 1995) ‘Beautiful’ varies by culture (Cunningham et al. 1995).
The researcher will further delve into the major differences in multicultural young girls’ relationships with their bodies in this chapter, and their relationships to dominant cultural standards of beauty.
Unlike previous generations, Gen- Z never really had a meaningful choice about whether to use social media or not. They are highly connected and do not know a world without it. According to Statista one of the most popular social media platforms for Generation Z in the Netherlands 2020
was Instagram by %82. Dutch people aged between 12-24 have the highest use of social media with %96,8 . Looking at the statistics for American Gen-Z users, use of Instagram increased to 67% in 2021 compared to 62% in 2020. It is stated that Gen-Z ers spend 8+ hours a day online. (Global Web Index) This astonishing fact not only influences how they form their opinions and obtain information but also aspects such as emotional and mental well-being. Heavy editing and toxicity of the body standards present on Instagram, increases body awareness in terms of how they are not meeting the preset standards and they struggle with the mental health effects of spending hours in worlds that encourage heavy social comparison. More than %20 believe life was better before social media, according to polling by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
- RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This section of the research shows how the research is structured and conducted. The research design will be explained first, followed by the definition of the data collection and sampling methodology.
3.1 Research design
The descriptive nature of this study requires the research design to follow a qualitative approach. The qualitative approach allows a more thorough depicting and leveraging “the point of view of those being studied and the sensitivity to context” (Bryman et al., 1996, p. 353) Due to the exploratory nature of the research, qualitative research is often subject to change as well (Mason, 2002). An ethnographic fieldwork will be carried out to be able to answer the main research question, which asks about experiences, sensemaking and reasoning of the participants. Ethnographic methodology is defined by Van Maanen (2011) as a process in which the researcher immerses himself/herself in a situation and perform in depth participant observations.
Firstly, the objectives and research questions will be set. Then the effects of Instagram on young teenage girls in international schools of Amsterdam in the perspective of body policing and how their relationships are shaped accordingly will be defined. Secondly, their thoughts, feelings and experiences will be observed within their context. The research will continue by defining the qualitative semi-structured interviews with the focus group and sampling methods. Then, the gathered data will be processed, analyzed, and the findings will be discussed under the light of relevant theories.
3.2 Data gathering and sampling
The scope of this research will be restricted with the female students of international schools in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The target group will be aged between 13-17 and students with different nationalities and cultural backgrounds will particularly be chosen to adhere to the perspective of this study.
Semi-structured interviews will be done and if needed, focus groups will be held consisting of only female students who have a daily use of Instagram. The use of semi-structured interviews gives the interviewees the freedom to explain their point of view and adding new lines of thoughts while giving the interviewer structure. On the other hand, use of a focus group is a way to bring the different participants together and have them discuss each other’s views and respond to them. This way they can learn from each other and maybe form a constructive view of the topic (Bryman, 2012, p. 501). In order to guarantee that everyone is heard during the focus group, the group will be kept small. For this reason, two or more focus groups might be held with four to five participants if deemed necessary by the researcher.
This method is of relevance for this research, for the goal is to gather the experiences of the participants. The focus group will be held in an unstructured setting so that the participants can respond to each other, share and discuss their own experiences and learn from others ‘experiences. (Bryman, 2012, p. 501).
3.3 Data Analysis
For this research, recordings of the semi-structured interviews as well as the focus groups will be made with prior permission and participants will be kept anonymous. Recordings will be made using a password protected, cellular phone and then interviews will be transcribed. After transcribing, the ‘grounded theory’ will be used in order to conceptualize any patterns and areas of interest within the data. Grounded theory is ideal for exploring integral social relationships and the behavior of groups where there has been little exploration of the contextual factors that affect individual’s lives (Crooks,2001).
The researcher will look for general themes that occurred during semi-structured interviews and in the focus groups, compare these with the existing literature on the topic as well as any background knowledge and do coding of the data gathered using the ATLAS-ti program.
Bohm argues that “coding may be described as the deciphering or interpretation of data and includes the naming of concepts and also explaining and discussing them in more detail” (Bohm, 2004). It is significant to do coding as it is a helpful tool to order and structure the data and can be used to write an analysis (Neyland, 2008). By using ATLAS-ti, firstly; open coding will be applied. According to Bryman (2012), this is the lowest level of coding in which labels are attributed to text fragments. This is mostly an inductive process which structures the data into broad categories (Bryman, 2012, p. 569). Secondly, axial coding will be applied which allows for concepts to be developed. Axial coding will be followed by selective coding where categories are grouped into themes which together develop a theory.
3.4 Quality Assurance
As with any intellectual project, the content and views expressed in this thesis may be considered objectionable by some readers, however; the researcher will show utmost care to remain critical while limiting her personal values and norms to influence this research.
3.4.1 Reliability
The participants will be chosen from only young females in international schools in Amsterdam within the age range of 13-17, belonging to different nationalities. They will all be users of the Instagram platform on a weekly basis. An element that might affect conformability is the way of gathering data. The semi-structured interviews conducted by the researcher may therefore only partly be the measurement instrument since the data will to some extent be connected to the researcher’s own values and norms (Schwartz- Shea & Yanow, 2009). By choosing interview as a way to gather data, the researcher relies on the sensemaking of participants, however, as Ybema et al. (2009) describes, sensemaking in an ongoing process which means their meaning-making of their senses can change over time. Meaning is not fixed but depends on time and context. This means that the findings may apply at the moment of research, but may decay over time. Another limitation is time and space as Ybema et al. (2009) mentioned in the book ‘Organizational Ethnography.’ Ethnographic research is a time-intensive trajectory to be able to understand lives and experiences. As there is a timespan of nearly five months granted for this research, the researcher will have to make concessions and limit her research. The researcher must also be careful with making claims for other similar contexts and drawing conclusions (Van der Waal, 2009), however; the role of the researcher will have its effects on the results. Therefore, frequent reflection is significant and the researcher by using thick description and interview skills such as paraphrasing and reflecting will make a conscious attempt to increase the trustworthiness of this research (Bryman, 2012).
3.4.2 Validity
A qualitative research is unlikely to gather data on a sample that is large enough to generalize to population (Bryman, 2016). However, as explained previously, by making semi-structured interviews and employing focus groups in the research design, the researcher aims to get a richness of information. Thus, the gathered data will contain in-depth analysis of students’ perspectives, feelings on the topic of Instagram and its influences on body policing, diversity and peer pressure. This will enhance the validity of the research. Validity in its simplest form refers to how accurately a chosen method measures what it is intended to measure.
This research will be reviewed and approved by the thesis committee members of The Hague Graduate School trained in the discipline.
3.4.3 Ethical concerns and Researcher’s role
This research involves young female teenagers and because it touches sensitive, personal information, the participants may feel reluctant to mention some quality details and tend to hide information regarding private matters, or frame some issues to look as latent. To address this concern, the researcher needs to establish some form of trust during the introduction phase and reassure the participants of the focus group about the confidentiality of the meeting which will result in the participants sharing more valuable information. The use of semi-structured interviews will also make the participants feel more comfortable giving them the luxury to partly steer the topics when they like which in return will ease the gathering of data without casting sensitive questions. By analyzing the answers of the interviews, an in-depth knowledge will be gained in regards to the extent to which respondents are affected by Instagram in terms of body policing.
3.4.4 Limitations
The researcher is fully aware of bias and in order to eliminate it, participants of prior acquaintance will not be involved in the study. Participants that are willing to participate in the interviews and focus groups will initially be verbally explained about the scope of this research and only those willing to take part will join the focus group. As the research takes place during the Covid-19 pandemic, another limitation might be that focus group interviews may not be face to face and have to be done online due to Covid-19 restrictions. Video calling may limit the researcher’s ability to read body language, however, participants will be encouraged to feel comfortable and use their webcams. Research by Bertrand and Bourdeau (2010) confirms that even if interviews are conducted online, trust and connection can be built if both parties use their webcam.
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