Television and Beauty Ideals in Rural Nicaragua

Boothroyd, Jucker et al. (2020).

(Open access version)

Summary: This paper used three different approaches to provide convincing evidence that television is changing preferences. A cross-sectional study of 300 individuals in 7 villages showed that watching TV predicted a preference for thinner and curvier women. This was also true when looking at within-individual change in preferences from year to year amongst a small community who were tested multiple times. Finally, an experimental study showed that viewing high or low weight models on a laptop actively changed villagers’ preferences, as is also seen in the laboratory in the UK.

Thornborrow et al. (2018) 

(Open access version)

Summary: When men created their ‘ideal woman’ using computergraphic software on a laptop, this in higher-media villages preferred female figures which were slimmer, and with larger breasts than in other villages. Follow up focus groups suggested that movement was more important than static appearance when men were judging attractiveness. Our participants suggested that they favoured body shapes which emphasised the movement of the lower body in walking or dancing.

Jucker et al. (2017)

Some non-Western populations may also prefer larger bodies due to a greater risk of insufficient food. Larger figures indicate a healthy person with good food resources. We therefore tested in villages which had high levels of nutritional stress and low media access, high nutritional stress and high TV access, and a village with good nutrition and high TV access. We found that TV consumption remained important to predicting body size preferences across these communities, while measures of nutrition had very little impact.

A greater discrepancy between the perceived ‘ideal’ female shape, and ones own body shape, can lead to dissatisfaction and negative feelings about ones body.  This study is examining the extent to which villages with different levels of television access exhibit different levels of body dissatisfaction.  We assessed this in both adult women, and in children who were assessed annually over three years.  Body dissatisfaction starts to develop very early in childhood in the West. This research will help us to understand the role the media may play in these problems in more diverse populations.

In Thornborrow et al (2022)  we showed that although body dissatisfaction and disordered eating is rare in rural Nicaraguan women, those who do experience these concerns show similar patterns as Western women: internalising thin ideals predicts dissatisfaction, which in turn predicts more disordere eathing attitudes.