Research on how television affects women from different ethnicities.

1. Ethnicity and Self-Esteem:
How Television Affects
College Women
Central Connecticut State University
Martha E. Evilla

2. Ethnicity and Body Image:
• Depending on age and background
there is a difference in the way a
woman perceives herself.
• Women from different ethnicities
may have a different body
dissatisfaction levels.

3. Television and Body Image
• The American woman is living in a
culture where perception is important.
• Plastic surgery and eating disorders are
increasing due to efforts to maintain or
alter women’s ideal body image.

4. Theories
• Sociocultural Theory
• Cultivation Theory
• Socio Comparison Theory

5. Sociocultural Theory
• The way thin body images are
portrayed in the western societies
• The women’s body is viewed as
“body as object”
• Being fat is viewed as unattractive

6. Cultivation Theory
• “cultivates beliefs, attitudes, and
ideas about the real world that
match the media depicted world”

7. Socio Comparison Theory
• Comparison occurs spontaneously but
people who are comparing themselves
are able to control how much they want
to compare themselves to

8. Goal of this study:
• find out how television affects
college women from different
ethnicities and self-esteem levels
• and to determine if there is a
correlation between self-esteem
levels and ethnic background.

9. I hypothesize
• That depending on ethnicity, television affects
college women’s body image differently.
• That women with higher self-esteem levels
will also have higher body satisfaction levels.
• I predict that women with high self-esteem
levels will be less susceptible to images
portrayed on television.

10. Overview
• 96 female participants
• Undergraduate students from CCSU
• Two surveys RSE and SATAQ-3

11. Limitations regarding this
study:
• Power
• Self-reporting
• Generalize the results
• Longer survey

12. What would I do different?
• Instead of giving only surveys, I would
show clips of different television shows.
Ex: BET Channel and Spanish Channel

13. Conclusion
• This research is valuable because women’s
health is at risk.
• More research needs to be done in this area to
fully understand why body image perception
varies across ethnic groups and the impact
that body image perception has on health.