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This paper aims to evaluate children’s literature that focuses on body size issues for elementary readers.

The paper used an evaluative tool based on three categories: content, audience and other considerations.

The evaluative tool was used to evaluate six children’s books identified as critical literature supporting body image. The books evaluated focused on body image but were also tied to other themes such as body positivity, body neutrality, self-love, acceptance, diversity and inclusivity. All books acknowledged and celebrated the uniqueness of varied body types.

Because of the number of books evaluated, the evaluative results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to evaluate other critical children’s literature focused on body image.

The paper offers recommendations for parents, teachers and schools.

This paper encourages the need for parents, teachers and schools to help children embrace body positivity and neutrality so that they would love their skin.

Most fashion advertising in the UK uses and targets young, slim women (and/or men). The purpose of this paper research is to ask whether this approach is relevant and appropriate to older women, who make up a large and growing segment of the market, and who generally have more disposable income to spend on clothes.

Adapted qualitative techniques were used to examine two groups of women, one younger and one older. The Contour Drawing Rating Scale was used to examine the women's self‐image and the ideal size they perceived models should be. Triadic Sorting with laddering interviews revealed how the women perceived some recent adverts.

Although the older women, on the whole, were larger than the younger women, they displayed a greater level of satisfaction and contentment with their body's size and appearance. Both groups felt that fashion models should be larger than they are currently and the older women, in particular, felt that the advert using “normal‐sized” women was the most effective in selling product.

Directed towards the creators of fashion advertising and fashion retailers, this research was one of the first attempts to uncover how older women view fashion advertising. It reveals that while older women do not necessarily expect to see women of their own age in adverts they do require that the models are more reflective of “normal‐sized” women going about “normal” activities. In short, to interest them in the products being sold, they need advertising to be relevant to their everyday lives, without being condescending or resorting to escapism.

This paper represents one of the first research studies in the UK to explore older “normal” women and their perceptions of body‐image related to fashion advertising. It also uses specifically adapted qualitative methods to achieve its purpose.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on body image and aging among older women. Using existing qualitative research, this paper explores how aging affects body image and how women respond to body image issues as they age.

Multiple databases were used to locate original and review articles on the topics of body image and aging, with a target population of women ages 60 years and older. The findings of the literature search were compiled, summarized and sorted to create themes.

Women struggle with body image issues throughout their lives. Women tend to perceive age-related changes in appearance negatively, as a threat to their identity and social value. This is due, in part, to the sociocultural environment, which pressures women to “fight” aging and maintain an ideal (young and thin) image at all costs. Some women do come to terms with their aging body and report increased self-acceptance with age. However, others turn to various forms of body work (e.g. dieting, hair dye, makeup) in order to maintain their value in an appearance-based society.

Poor body image can affect older women's emotional, psychological and physical health and overall well-being. Health care professionals, community workers and policy makers need to be made aware of these issues so that they can respond appropriately.

There has been limited research exploring body image among older women. This paper identifies gaps in the literature and suggests avenues for future research in this area.

This paper aims to investigate the role of body size on female consumers’ fashion brand image perceptions.

An experimental design was used whereby the model’s body size in a fictitious advert was digitally manipulated to create four advertising images with an underweight, slender, average and obese model size (all other factors remained constant). Through an intercept survey of German female consumers, respondents were exposed to one of the four images, and asked questions pertaining to their brand image perceptions.

The findings suggest that for older consumers, model body size has no significant impact on their brand image perceptions. For younger consumers (18-25), there was some limited evidence of how a positive brand image affects when a slender model size is used, but there was no evidence that underweight models have a more positive impact on brand image.

The sample was restricted to a single German city (Berlin) with a relatively small sample and, therefore, the generalisability of the findings may be limited. It would be interesting to repeat the study in different cultural contexts. Whilst this paper focussed on potential differences in perceptions between different age groups, future studies could consider other factors, such as fashion involvement or consumer personality on the impact of body size on brand image.

Given the potential link to low self-esteem and eating disorders, it is recommended that fashion brands cease using clinically underweight models. Brands targeting older consumers may benefit from using larger models.

There is limited research to date that looks at the role of body size on brand image, and this is one of the first studies to consider all non-product-related brand image associations, and how perceptions may differ between different age groups, with many previous studies relying on student samples.

Media images of unrealistic beauty have been identified as a determinant of women's body dissatisfaction. This experimental study aims to explore whether the negative impact of such images could be reduced by a one‐time educational intervention consisting of a presentation and discussion, teaching women to be critical of media images.

Female psychology students (n=176) from a university in the UK were randomly assigned to the control or intervention group and completed measures of body dissatisfaction after being challenged by images of the perfect female body. Follow up data were collected four weeks later.

The results suggested that the intervention had no immediate buffering effect on body dissatisfaction but participants in the intervention group showed a long‐term improvement for confidence, attractiveness and body‐parts dissatisfaction.

This one‐time intervention could be used to protect young women against the detrimental impact of media images in the longer term.

This study provides an evidence base for the use of an educational intervention for young people in schools and colleges.

The purpose of this paper is to review current programmes and major issues surrounding preventive interventions for body image and obesity in schools.

A literature review was carried out by analysing papers cited in major literature databases from the last 50 years. This review describes and summarises activities from body image programmes and eating disorder prevention programmes in schools and outlines self esteem and media literacy approaches that have produced positive results in some large, randomised and controlled interventions.

A total of 21 programmes met the inclusion criteria. Of these, four included males and 17 reported at least one improvement in knowledge, beliefs, attitudes or behaviours. The most effective programmes were interactive, involved parents, built self esteem and provided media literacy.

Body image concerns, eating problems and obesity among children and adolescents are becoming increasingly targeted for preventive health education and health promotion programmes. The role of health educators is complicated because of legitimate concerns that we must “do no harm” in our efforts to ameliorate both issues in schools. Health educators need to be careful to ensure that the implementation of programmes for the prevention of child obesity do not inadvertently create food concerns, body image issues, weight stigma, prejudice or eating disorders. Similarly, eating disorder prevention programmes must take care both not to condone obesity nor to glamorise or normalise dieting or disordered eating.

This paper provides health educators with an overview of important issues and suitable strategies to consider when implementing programmes for body image improvement and the prevention of eating problems and childhood obesity.

The purpose of this paper is to determine which factors impact body image satisfaction of Generation Y college age and young professional females born between the years of 1980 and 1993, age 20-33 years in the State of Texas.

An online survey created in Qualtrics was e-mailed to recruit research participants. Quantitative data were collected and analyzed in IBM SPSS Statistics 21. Exploratory factor analysis, reliability, computing variable mean, and linear multiple regression were performed. The variables explored were divided and grouped into major factors.

Millennial females are influenced by their own personal preferences, morals and beliefs, and certain occasions, seasons, climate, and the weather. These factors significantly influence body image satisfaction. The model developed in this study provides researchers with a new perspective on body image satisfaction and purchase intent. This study extends the theory of reasoned action by identifying specific factors which influence body image satisfaction which leads to the final purchase decision.

Because of this method of data collection the study might not be generalizable to the entire Millennial population. The sample is a small representative sample in the population with only Millennial females’ ages 20-33 years in the State of Texas. Although the study focussed on a single state, the state is an extremely large state encompassing 36 percent of the USA population. Additionally, race/ethnic diversity was also a limitation, as the majority of the sample was Caucasian. Thus, a larger and more diverse sample of age, race/ethnicity, and residence could be added for more generalizable results.

The findings of this study enable retailers to understand how body image can impact the customers perceptions of their stores and their employees. Marketers and retailers should focus on marketing to Millennial females through more personal approach targeting what is appropriate for the consumers size body type labeled clothing size and certain occasions.

Confidence in decision making while purchasing apparel is an important aspect of shopping. Further research could benefit from focussing on determining the confidence drivers and their origins.

This study enhances literature by providing a glimpse into the minds of Generation Y female consumers’ body image satisfaction and the factors driving them to purchase apparel.

Body image perception is a complex cognitive process that involves several different dimensions. This has necessitated several studies to have different findings about each dimension, therefore. This is because body image perception is a continuous and constantly evolving process. The development of self-concept depends largely on positive or negative perception of body image in today’s time. This paper aims to develop an instrument to measure beliefs and attitudes of people involved in the perception of body image, defined as the perception that a person has of their physical self and the thoughts and feelings that result into a positive or negative self-concept.

The factorial structure, reliability, content validity and impact of gender on factor structure of body image perception scale (BIPS) were examined among university students (N = 200) in study, with male (n = 100) and female (n = 100) population. Self-made instrument BIPS was used.

Exploratory factor analysis using direct obliman method based on principal component analysis indicated a three-factor, 20-item scale including subscales 1) negative feeling; 2) public perception; and 3) future success. BIPS exhibited decent reliability (0.789) and content validity in both male and female university students, suggesting a highly significant difference between the two genders on BIPS.

The major limitation was that the sample was obtained from student population; therefore, it will not be entirely correct to generalize it to the whole population of Pakistan. Future studies need to include samples from different populations in Pakistan to bring out a more generalized view and try to minimize the variances in sample as much as possible for better results. Finally, the sample was drawn only from educated and young adult males and females (age ranging 17–28). Middle age and old age people must be included in future study. Also, in this study incremental and discriminant validity can be computed by comparing results on BIPS with any other body image questionnaire.

This standard instrument can be efficiently used for the research purpose and will enable the researcher to identify the positive and negative feelings and attitudes of male and females towards their body image and towards the development of healthy self-concept. The scale can be used by clinical psychologists and medical health professionals to help assess and treat their patients more accurately.

All in all, it can be suggested that the findings received illustrated that body image perception differs significantly among both men and women in Pakistani culture. The newly established version of BIPS with its high reliability indicates that the scale can be used in future as well with diverse populations to assess whether which among them hold either positive or negative self-concept of themselves based on their body image perceptions. Moreover, as the psychometric strength of the scale is well established, it can be used with future researches by health psychologists, dietitians and nutritionists to identify body image concerns among young males and females, especially in individuals with eating disorders.

Two-dimensional (2D) measurement technology has become more popular than before, thanks to the widespread availability of smartphones and smart devices. However, most existing 2D body measurement systems have background constraints and may raise privacy concerns. The purpose of this research was to test the idea of designing a 2D measurement system that works with a color-coded measurement garment for background removal and privacy protection. Clothing consumers can use the proposed system for daily apparel shopping purposes.

A 2D body measurement system was designed and tested. The system adopted a close-fitted color-coded measurement garment and used neural network models to detect the color-code in the garment area and remove backgrounds. In total, 78 participants were recruited, and the collected data were split into training and testing sets. The training dataset was used to train the neural network and statistical prediction models for the 2D system. The testing dataset was used to compare the performance of the 2D system with a commercial three-dimensional (3D) body scanner.

The results showed that the color-coded measurement garment worked well with the neural network models to process the images for measurement extraction. The 2D measurement system worked better at close-fitted areas than loose-fitted areas.

This research combined a color-coded measurement garment with neural network models to solve the privacy and background challenges of the 2D body measurement system. Other researchers have never studied this approach.