Self Percieved Body Image of Adolescent Girls - Essay Example

The study will also attempt to identify the ideal perceived body image of each respondent and ascertain how far this is from the individuals’ actual body size and their perception of their own body size. This study was chosen due to the increase of young girls at various youth groups discussing the way they look and feel about themselves, what they eat and do not eat. Also, I personally cannot remember a time in my adult life when I have felt totally happy and secure with my own body image or that of my family and friends, consequently I wanted to determine if this was true of other women and preliminary questioning of my friends suggested that the majority of women also feel this pressure to conform to a stereotypical, and very narrow, ideal of acceptable body shape.

The study arouse out of my curiosity of when this phenomena begins in a woman’s life, and by questioning adolescent girls I wanted to discover if their self perception is in any way different to my own. The fact that this is a very emotive issue, and for ethical reasons it was decided that the youngest girls questioned for this particular piece of research would be 14 years of age. At the starting point of the study I felt I did not have enough knowledge of when the issue arises to question younger girls, and did not want to make them prematurely aware of body image issues without any structured support system other than counselors available.

From a practice-based perspective this would give further background information to then offer the right support and self esteem workshops to all adolescent girls who make use of the settings in which I work, before embarking on this crusade personal reassurance was needed and that the issue existed. This was done with guidance from the respondents themselves as to what practical measures could be put into place. The methodologies I utilised were those of applied research and action research, where ‘the agenda for the investigation