Meta analysis of beauty magazines

Sometimes I’m curious if anyone charts the kind of things that go on in a culture. I’m curious if we can look at messages and break them down into their DNA. I expect garments to be riding the wave of these messages and also reinforcing these messages, as a kind of “relay”.

no longer a pretty face

a thin ideal for women, a change that is concurrent with the increase in disturbed eating patterns among American women.

coincided with a decrease in the media’s portrayal of women’s ideal body weight (Wiseman, Gray, Mosimann, & Ahrens, 1992).

It would be neat to look and see how they explain these rises together.

This is one data point about the thin ideal and its rise.

Friendly advice? Beauty messages in web sites of teen magazines

physical changes precipitated by puberty often bring adolescent boys closer to the male body ideal but distance adolescent girls from the thin sociocultural standard of beauty for women (Koff, Rierdan, & Stubbs, 1990).

Interesting thought!

A study of Seventeen magazine conducted across three publication peri- ods—1961, 1972, and 1985—revealed that 50% of all editorial copy was dedi- cated to physical beauty (Peirce, 1990)

Note this way of measuring.

Bem (1993) argued that our society is characterized by androcentrism, or male centeredness, with women being defined either in terms of their domestic or reproductive functions, or in terms of their “power to stimulate and satisfy a male’s sexual appetite”

Bem (1993) argued that the unconscious imposition of a gender-based classification on social reality is limiting to both women and men, whose internalized lens may prevent them from behaving in ways that are incompatible with cultural norms regard- ing masculinity and femininity.

Would Blurryness help? Or hurt?

we documented our analysis using an approach drawn from ethnographic content analysis (ECA), a qualitative media analysis method described by Altheide (1996). ECA uses analyses of numerical and narrative data via constant comparison to discover emergent patterns, emphases, and themes of messages and to understand the organization and process of how they are presented.

Unlike quantitative research, qualitative inquiry seeks to analyze the form and con- tent of human behavior rather than subject it to mathematical calculations.

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Lofland (1971) suggested that qualitative research can be viewed in terms of the questions it asks: “What kinds of things are going on here? What are the forms of this phenomenon? What variations do we find in this phenomenon?” (p. 13).

I appreciate this breakdown on method.


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