Association between mass media and body weight concern among Jordanian adolescents’ residents of Amman: the role of gender and obesity.

Abstract

Objectives

Body image in the mass media promotes an unrealistic picture of body shape that leads to body dissatisfaction among adolescentsQuery. Therefore, the study presented in this paper aimed to assess the association between mass media and adolescents’ weight concerns and perceptions of body weight and shape.

Methods

A cross-sectional survey was conducted on school adolescents aged between 15 and 18 years during the academic year 2013–2014. Multistage stratified sampling method was used. The number of participants in the study was 795 students: 400 boys and 395 girls.

Results

All participants have a common behavior in rarely reading magazines, but they spend more than 2 h in watching television or less than 3 h using the internet. However, most of obese/non-obese adolescents, boys or girls, have shown high influence (p < 0.05) of reading magazines on the subject of dieting to lose weight.

Conclusion

While obese students read more magazines on dieting to lose weight, other mass media did not show the same results on weight concerns and body shape among Jordanian adolescents.