The indirect effects of Instagram images on women’s self-esteem: The moderating roles of BMI and perceived weight

Abstract

Viewing idealized social media images may negatively impact women’s self-esteem, yet the underlying mechanisms and vulnerable female groups remain under-investigated. This online experiment applied a posttest-only, between-subjects design to examine the interaction effects of viewing #fitspiration and #thinspiration Instagram images, body mass index, and perceived weight on women’s self-esteem ( N = 221) via appearance comparison. A moderated moderated mediation analysis (MMMA) shows significant effects for fitspiration and thinspiration conditions. Fitspiration pictures predicted lower self-esteem among Overweight women with perceived healthy weight (OH) than healthy weight women with perceived healthy weight (HH) and those with perceived overweight (HO). Thinspiration images resulted in lower self-esteem among HO than HH and OH. Implications include the importance of subjective and objective appearance comparison measurements, effect sizes of idealized social media images, the usefulness of MMMA, and the call for an Instagram literacy program.

Methodological Aspects in Study of Fat Stigma in Social Media Contexts: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Other concepts that have been categorized are based on childhood/adolescents' obesity [23,33,36,39] and the link between obesity and associated health issues [24,25,28,30,32,34,38], with one other study's focus on mental health issues [24]. Only two articles conducted gender specific research, that is, these studies employed female participants to investigate the effects of obesity-related discussions on them [21,24].…”

“…Most of these studies aimed at identifying how users project their views in obesity-related discussions over social media forms to enable understanding of their perceptions towards fat people [3,21,23,27,28,30,32,36,41]. A few other research studies focused on the effect of obesity-related discussions on fat people and their usage in clinical settings [22,38]. When studying the implications of fat stigma content in social media, the effect that idealized body images have on fat people and on their close contacts, peers and parents are also taken into consideration.…”

“…The domain refers to the social media platform that provided the researchers with the empirical dataset for their investigation. Ten of the review articles used Twitter as the data source [22,23,[25][26][27]32,34,35,38,40], while nine considered other social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and public websites (e.g., newspaper comments) [3,20,21,24,28,29,31,36,37]. Three articles did not acquire data from social media platforms, rather, they surveyed and interviewed social media users [30,33,39].…”

“…Only four articles indicated a sizeable data collection, that is, these studies have extracted more than 10,000 data records (i.e., posts, tweets, etc.) from social media platforms and among these, three articles had collected obesity-related data records in the order of millions [22,32,38]. Two articles closely analyzed videos on YouTube to explore how fat people are portrayed in visual displays [20,31]; further, one other article used images to analyze the effect of body ideals on fat individuals [28].…”

“…Two articles closely analyzed videos on YouTube to explore how fat people are portrayed in visual displays [21,32]; further, one other article used images to analyze the effect of body ideals on fat individuals [29]. Finally, several other research articles examined the effect of obesity-related discussions and experiences of being exposed to stigmatizing content by interviewing and monitoring human participants [22,25,31,34,38,40]. This variation in data characteristics across the 22 articles being reviewed calls for different analytical methods, diverse techniques and a wide array of tools/models for conducting subsequent analysis.…”