Race and Female Body Image

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 t

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We predicted that African American women that grew up with friends of their race had a more positive outlook on body image. The asymptotic significance of friends of the same race growing up, race, and comparing themselves with others was 0.

The next thing we did was run a crosstabulation between the total number measures used to lose weight by a woman and the race they identified with. When asking women how often they compared themselves to others, 11. Of this data, the highest percentage of African Americans reported on occasion while Caucasians had the highest percentage report often. We did hypothesize that there would be a relationship between race and the races of a woman’s friends growing up. 7 percent reported on occasion and 29. 25 measures to lose weight and the mode was 2.

An added aspect of body image that we found interesting to test was the number of measures a woman has used to lose weight. 045 which means we can reject the null hypothesis that there is no correlation between race and how women think about their bodies.

Approximate Word count = 1956
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

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