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Exposure to Social Media Celebrities and Its Association with Young Women’s Disordered Eating

Yara Qutteina (SESRI, Qatar University)
Catherine Nasrallah (SESRI, Qatar University)
Linda Kimmel (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan)
Salma Khaled (SESRI, Qatar University)

Keywords: Social media, big data, sentiment analysis, and emerging technologies

Abstract

Prior research has shown that intense celebrity exposure via traditional media, such as television and magazines, has adverse effect on young women’s psychological and general wellbeing. The frequency of use of traditional media outlets has been shown to interact with various celebrity-related attributes to amplify negative impact on body image and eating-related health behaviors, but few studies have investigated this effect in social media. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media outlets, provide celebrities with more pervasive mediums for communication and real-time interaction with fans, especially youth. Celebrities are most often endorsers of fashion, “junk” foods, and commercial diets, as well as negative role models for extreme dieting and desire for thinness. The aim of this study is to evaluate the synergistic interaction of the frequency of social media use and affinity to western celebrities on disordered eating attitudes and behaviors in young Arab women. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an online survey of a representative sample of female students in a national university in Qatar, which hosts the biggest number of female student admissions in the country. We assessed the use of different social media outlets as well as celebrity exposure using questions previously tested in face-to-face qualitative (cognitive) interviews with a small sample drawn from this population. Similarly, we employed a version of the Eating Attitude Test (EAT-26) scale that was previously used to identify disordered eating in this population. To our knowledge this is the first survey examining the social media celebrity effect in a large probability sample of young Arab women using culturally adapted measures. Our study adds to the small body of research on social media use and celebrity effect on young women’s health, with important implications for different cultural contexts.