Cultural Norms, Stigma and Vulnerability to Obesity-Related Stress

Description: 
"Fat stigma," the social discrediting of people who are overweight – especially obese – solely on the basis of that trait, is well-engrained in mainstream American society. This study is concerned with understanding how and why that stigma related to obesity exists, persists and is distributed in our everyday lives, and how some people are able to resist the internalization of extremely negative messages about “being fat” while others do not. A central issue is how this social devaluing of women who are overweight and obese might act to shape and attenuate its negative health effects on individuals because it elevates their biosocial stress levels.

Currently, we are collecting and analyzing data from a sample of women living in Phoenix and those they identify as their social networks. We are also in the initial stages of thinking through some comparative, contrasting studies in more traditionally fat-positive societies, such as in the central Pacific Islands.

Some of the tools we use include cultural norms surveys, stigma scales, body image surveys, social network interviews, anthropometry and depression screening (as our measure of stress effects). We are using these data to identify and distinguish the distribution of cultural norms related to obesity in people's social networks, deviations from those norms, their contrast with highly stigmatizing beliefs and their impact on women’s individual reactions to their overweight bodies. 

Understanding how stigma and the bodily expression of obesity are linked is important because the effects – while theorized – have been little investigated empirically and could be profound given the prejudice against obesity in U.S. society (and possibly increasingly globally) and because it potentially affects very many people (over 70% of adults in the United States are now clinically defined as overweight or obese, and numbers are growing apace globally).