Elsevier

Body Image

Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 195-204
Body Image

Weight and muscularity concerns as longitudinal predictors of body image among early adolescent boys: A test of the dual pathways model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2007.12.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to examine the longitudinal contributions of weight loss and muscularity concerns as dual pathways to body image dissatisfaction among early adolescent boys. Study 1 included 67 boys who reported on weight loss concerns, internalized muscular ideal, BMI, and body dissatisfaction during 7th grade and 1 year later. In Study 2, 87 7th and 8th grade boys were assessed in the fall and spring of a school year. The results confirmed that although both weight and muscularity concerns were related to body dissatisfaction, concern with weight loss more strongly detracted from a positive body image than did muscularity concern. The findings are discussed in terms of potential developmental variations in the relative contribution of weight and muscularity to body dissatisfaction among adolescent boys.

Introduction

The desire to develop muscularity has emerged as a central issue associated with male body image (McCreary & Sasse, 2000; Thompson & Cafri, 2007). The sociocultural pressure for the ideal muscular build has been increasingly evident in recent years in the greater attention given to muscularity in the media and lives of men (Leit, Gray, & Pope, 2001; Pope, Olivardia, Gruber, & Borowiecki, 1999). These sociocultural trends have seemingly had an impact on adolescent boys in that muscularity has been reported as a common concern (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2006) during the middle school and high school years and has been related to strategies to increase muscularity, such as body building, food supplements, and anabolic steroid use (Cafri et al., 2005; Drewnowski, Kurth, & Krahn, 1995; Ricciardelli & McCabe, 2003). Furthermore, the drive for muscularity has been related to lower self-esteem, heightened depression, body dissatisfaction, and body image disturbances among adolescent boys (Labre, 2002; McCreary & Sasse, 2000; Ricciardelli & McCabe, 2004; Smolak & Stein, 2006).

Although there is ample evidence that muscularity concerns have been important in the development of body image among males (Thompson & Cafri, 2007), there has also been evidence that weight loss concerns should be considered a central aspect of body image. Among adolescent boys, the experience of weight concerns has been related to dieting, eating disorders, and body dissatisfaction. Boys who have higher BMI levels have been more likely to engage in strategies to lose weight during preadolescence (McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2005; Saling, Ricciardelli, & McCabe, 2005) and adolescence (Neumark-Sztainer, Story, Falkner, Beuhring, & Resnick, 1999). In a longitudinal study of boys ages 6–14, increases in weight significantly predicted heightened disordered eating in the third year of the study (Gardner, Stark, Friedman, & Jackson, 2000). Furthermore, boys who are heavier as indicated by higher BMI scores or perceive themselves to be too heavy have been found to have greater body dissatisfaction (Jones, 2001, Jones et al., 2004; Lund, Frisen, & Hwang, 2007; Paxton, Eisenberg, & Neumark-Sztainer, 2006; Ricciardelli, McCabe, Lillis, & Thomas, 2006).

It is important to note that BMI and concern with weight loss among adolescent boys can vary across ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic groups (Mellor, McCabe, Ricciardelli, & Ball, 2004; Neumark-Sztainer et al., 1999). Still weight-related concerns and behaviors have been found to be as prevalent among a range of cultural groups compared to White adolescent boys and men (Neumark-Sztainer, Croll et al., 2002; Ricciardelli, McCabe, Williams, & Thompson, 2007).

On a societal level, the increasing rates of childhood and adolescent obesity have also made weight a prominent social issue. Recent reports have revealed that the prevalence of overweight adolescents has tripled over the last 25 years (Dietz, 2004). Approximately 30% of 12–19-year-old boys have been identified as at-risk or overweight because their body mass index (BMI) levels were greater than the 85th percentile (Neumark-Sztainer, Story, Hannan, & Croll, 2002; Ogden, Flegal, Carroll, & Johnson, 2002). Rising rates of obesity have also called attention to the social challenges for obese children and adolescents. Obese children and adolescents have been more frequently socially isolated (Strauss & Pollack, 2003) and targets of teasing and bullying than normal weight students (Janssen, Craig, Boyce, & Pickett, 2004). Thus the accumulating evidence at the social, cultural and psychological levels has indicated that weight loss concerns should be considered a central component in the development of body image for boys.

Even though weight and muscularity concerns have been identified as potentially distinct aspects of body dissatisfaction for boys, much of the literature has examined these factors separately so that their unique contributions to body dissatisfaction have not been adequately assessed. In order to overcome this limitation, a recent study conceptualized weight and muscularity concerns as dual pathways to body dissatisfaction among adolescent boys from middle school and high school (Jones & Crawford, 2005). The results indicated that weight loss concerns and muscularity were not related to each other and had separate, distinct relationships with body dissatisfaction. However, the dual-pathway model was evaluated with cross-sectional data so that the prospective contributions of both weight and muscularity concerns to body dissatisfaction were not documented.

The purpose of this research was to examine the longitudinal contributions of weight and muscularity concerns to body image dissatisfaction among early adolescent boys. The early adolescent period was selected for study because of its developmental significance for the emergence of body image issues among boys (Ricciardelli et al., 2006; Smolak & Stein, 2006).

The primary expectation of the current study was that weight and muscularity concerns would represent dual pathways making significant yet distinct contributions to body dissatisfaction. Based on previous support for the model, it was hypothesized that individuals who expressed greater concern with these aspects of their appearance would experience greater negative affect about their body image.

BMI was also included as a factor in the model. Although there has been evidence linking BMI and body dissatisfaction (Paxton et al., 2006; Ricciardelli et al., 2006; Saling et al., 2005), we expected the association in the dual pathways model to be indirect and accounted for by the contributions of weight and muscularity concerns to body dissatisfaction. This prediction is based on previous research in which BMI had distinct relationships with weight and muscularity concerns which in turn made independent contributions to body dissatisfaction (Jones & Crawford, 2005). This indirect pattern suggested that it was the individual concerns associated with BMI such as reflected in weight loss or muscularity that were the critical links to body dissatisfaction.

A positive relationship was expected between BMI and weight loss concerns. Previous research has generally indicated that among preadolescents and adolescent boys, higher BMI status has been related to greater dieting and body dissatisfaction in both cross-sectional (Jones, 2001; Jones et al., 2004; Newman, Sontag, & Salvato, 2006) and longitudinal studies (Paxton et al., 2006; Ricciardelli et al., 2006; Saling et al., 2005).

The hypothesized relationship between BMI and muscularity concerns was expected to be negative based on previous research. Boys who considered muscularity to be important (Ricciardelli et al., 2006; Smolak, Levine, & Thompson, 2001) or were dissatisfied with their current levels of muscularity (Jones & Crawford, 2005; McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2005) have been more likely to have lower BMIs. It should be noted, however, there have been inconsistent findings in the relationship between BMI and muscularity concerns. Other studies of males ranging from the preadolescent through the college years have reported no relationship between BMI and several different measures of muscularity concerns (McCreary, Karvinen, & Davis, 2006; Ricciardelli et al., 2006; Saling et al., 2005; Smolak & Stein, 2006).

We evaluated the model on two independent, non-overlapping samples of early adolescent boys. In the first sample, boys were followed over a year from 7th to 8th grade. The second study included 7th- and 8th-grade boys and took place over a 6-month period during one academic year.

Section snippets

Participants

The longitudinal sample included 67 boys (mean age = 12.6 years) from two middle schools in a major metropolitan area of the Northwest. The 82 initial participants volunteered when they were in the 7th grade. Eighty-two percent of the original sample responded to the second assessment approximately 1 year later. There were no differences on any of the study variables between the boys in the longitudinal and attrition samples.

The students were from middle- to upper–middle-class backgrounds as

Results

The correlations among the primary study variables and the descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. There were moderate correlations among the variables except for BMI which was negligibly correlated with the other variables. Still BMI (M = 20.19) was similar to the levels reported in other research on middle school boys (M = 20.13, Smolak et al., 2001; M = 20.86, Smolak & Stein, 2006). The discrepancy scores between ideal and current weight were available for 61 of the participants because

Discussion

The results of Study 1 indicate that the clarity of the dual-pathway model evident in cross-sectional research is less apparent in the longitudinal analysis. In previous cross-sectional research on middle school and high school boys (Jones & Crawford, 2005), both muscularity and weight concerns contributed equally to body dissatisfaction. In the current cross-sectional and longitudinal models, however, only weight loss concerns and not muscular ideals were more strongly related to body

Participants

A non-overlapping sample of middle school boys was recruited from two middle schools in a major suburban school district in the Northwest. The longitudinal participants included 51 7th grade boys (mean age = 12.5 years) and 36 8th grade boys (mean age = 13.4 years). The 87 students represented 73% of the original sample (n = 119) who responded to the second assessment. There were no differences between the longitudinal and attrition samples in the study variables.

The sample was primarily European

Results

Table 4 presents the correlations among the study variables and the descriptive statistics for Study 2. The mean values for the measures were slightly higher though still comparable to Study 1. The correlations tended to be moderate among the study variables and similar in pattern to Study 1 with two exceptions. Although the near-zero correlation between BMI and the measure of muscularity concerns was the same as in Study 1, BMI was more strongly related to body dissatisfaction in Study 2 than

Conclusions

The primary goal of this research was to evaluate weight loss and muscularity concerns as dual pathways to body dissatisfaction. Although previous research has focused primarily on muscularity as the central feature of body image development for boys, this research adds to the literature by evaluating both weight and muscularity concerns as longitudinal predictors of body dissatisfaction over either 6 months or a year. One of the primary messages of this research is that during the early

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