Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Research Article

Media Influence on the Body Image Among Students in UAE

¹College of Medicine, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, UAE

²Department of Community Medicine, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, UAE

³Research division, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, UAE

Corresponding Author:

Dr. Jayadevan Sreedharan
Research division
Gulf Medical University
Ajman, UAE
Tel: +97167463333
Fax: +97167464222
E-mail: researchdivision2@gmail.com

Received Date: October 08, 2012; Accepted October 17, 2012; Published Date: October 19, 2012

Citation: Sreedharan J, Antony A, Qureshi S, Fazal S, Siddiqui H, et al. (2012) Media Influence on the Body Image Among Students in UAE. J Community Med Health Educ 2:182. doi: 10.4172/2161-0711.1000182

Copyright: © 2012 Sreedharan J, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objectives: This study intended to determine the degree of influence of the media on the body image of students in the United Arab Emirates.
Materials and methods: This cross-sectional survey collected data from 372 school and college students residing in UAE (129 males, 243 females) using a self-administered questionnaire. The data collected included sociodemographic characteristics, height, weight, social factors, and influence of different media on perceived body image. Data was entered on Microsoft Excel and analyzed on PASW 18.0 version using chi-square test for association and data presented as descriptive statistics.
Results: Twenty eight percent of the study group reported media to be the most influential factor on perception of appearance, of which internet was found to be the most influential medium (47.3% males and 42% females) on body image, followed by television (31% males and 37% females). Media were not as important as “attitude of family” (37.4%), “attitude of the opposite sex” (36.9%) or “attitude of friends/peers” (34.7%) which ranked highest among the most influencing factors. Media were considered moderately influencing (37.4%), with the other factors having almost equal importance. Media had effect only on the emotional and cognitive aspects. It was found that no single factor among the tested influential factors had a great impact on the body image of the youth of UAE, though there were several moderately influencing factors of almost equal importance. The overweight participants considered media to have ‘strong influence’ (p<0.06) which was not statistically significant.
Conclusion: Peers, family, and those of opposite gender were found to have more influence on body image than media. However, internet was the most influential media for both males and females and so may be used for educating all the influential persons in this regard.

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