Impact on women's body satisfaction of exposure to postpartum imagery on social media

TL;DR

Exposure to postpartum imagery on social media does not significantly affect women's body satisfaction or appreciation.

Contribution

The study investigates the impact of Instagram-like imagery on postpartum women's body satisfaction and explores the effect of adding health-focused content.

Findings

State body satisfaction and appreciation did not change after exposure to body-focused imagery.

Adding postpartum-health-focused imagery did not alter the results.

Further research is suggested to explore health interventions via social media for postpartum women.

Abstract

Social networking sites may be a convenient, accessible and low-cost option for delivering health information at scale to postpartum women. However, social media use is associated with decreased body satisfaction and may contribute to psychological ill-health. Our study aimed to determine whether exposure to body-focused imagery, typical of imagery targeting postpartum women on Instagram, is associated with a reduction in state body satisfaction and state body appreciation. Secondly, we aimed to determine whether including postpartum-health-focused imagery, in conjunction with body-focused imagery, is associated with improving state body satisfaction/appreciation, compared with no postpartum health content.

A single blinded quasi-experimental survey study, recruiting women who had given birth in the previous 2-years, asked participants about key demographic information, social media use and assessed thin-ideal internalization and media appearance pressures using validated tools. Participants were then exposed to either (1) 15 body-focused images of women with a thin-average level of adiposity; (2) as per (1) PLUS 5 postpartum-health-focused images; or (3) as per (1) PLUS 15 postpartum-health-focused images. State body satisfaction/appreciation were assessed before and after image exposure.

State body satisfaction/appreciation did not change from pre- to post-image exposure in any groups and measures were not different between groups at any time point.

Short-term exposure to body-focused imagery typical of Instagram content targeting postpartum women may not alter state body satisfaction or state body appreciation. Furthermore, incorporating postpartum-health-focused imagery did not alter results. Further research investigating whether an intervention providing health information to postpartum women via social media platforms improves health outcomes may be warranted.

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