Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus, this study investigates media consumption, motives of media use, and reading strategies among Asian immigrant women in South Korea. The interview data from this study reveal that the total sum of media consumption among Asian immigrant informants tends to increase after immigration and that their media consumption can be regarded as omnivorous in style. Acquiring the host cultural capital and maintaining the home cultural capital are the major drives for their media use, resulting in three motives: the need for adaptation, the need for ethnic affirmation, and the need for relaxation. In response to the multicultural representation of the host media, the immigrant informants employ various reading strategies, such as empathetic reading, critical reading, distantiated reading, and avoidance of reading. The findings are discussed in light of the dialectic of habitus, the possibilities of multicultural capital, and the necessity for media education.

Research on body image has neglected a number of factors that seem likely to influence individuals’ eating disorders. This study looks at eating disorder relationships with age, cultural background, physical and psychological factors, amount and type of media exposure, and body image processing (i.e., comparing and endorsing thin ideals). Survey results from a sample of 376 Korean adolescent and college-aged females confirmed the mediating effect body image processing had on eating disorder indicators. Although striking age differences were found in the relationship between media use and eating disorders, there were also similarities between the two age groups. Comparing and endorsing thin ideals played a more important role among adolescent girls than among college-aged women. Contrary to previous research reported in the U.S., exposure to television “thin drama” was not a significant predictor of Korean females’ body image disturbance. Instead, exposure to foreign media had direct and indirect impacts on eating disorders among Korean females. Implications of the age and cross-cultural differences were discussed.

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