Media, Appearance, and Adolescence: An In-depth Study on the Relationship between Social Media Use and Skin-Color Anxiety in 3 non-WEIRD rural communi

As part of globalisation, appearance ideals have often been shown to have cultural causes.

Some aspects of appearance have been shown to be directly influenced by visual media (such as attitudes to body weight and shape.) In Latin America, cues to ethnicity, particularly skin color, are historically culturally loaded due to colonialism. Light-skinned people are also more common in the media.

The rapid increase in social media use by younger adults creates a new opportunity to study and understand how appearance ideals for younger people may be exaggerated or moderated through regular media use.

By studying this in low media populations, we can also start to disentangle historical cultural colorism from the effects of new media.

This project will study attitudes to skin colour in adolescents and younger adults in three rural and/or low socioeconomic status areas in Latin America: on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, and on the Caribbean Coasts of Nicaragua and Colombia.

The fieldsides all include ethnically diverse populations, and all include people with more- and less-access to visual media.

It will include ethnography and qualitative interviews in each location (Study 1), development of a novel measure of skin colour anxiety (Studies 2&3) and a large and cross-cultural cross-sectional questionnaire study which investigates skin colour anxiety within a broader framework of / ESRC NINE DTP Postgraduate Studentship Nomination Form / Page 3 of 13 sociocultural appearance pressures (Study 4).

Local participants will feed into the study at the start (in Study 1) and during data interpretation, to help understand how bias towards lighter skin is shaped by media across diverse Latin American settings.