“Happy Women are the Most Beautiful, but…”: The Use of Weight Stigmatization and Social Comparison to Analyze Media Images

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study offers a valuable interpretivist approach in understanding how beauty standards and social comparison influence viewing of a fat or thin media image. Participants (N = 135) viewed either an altered or unaltered female media image and then responded to a series of questions. Through inductively analyzing the written discourse, three themes were generated. The first theme highlights how socialization informed participants’ viewing and interpreting of the images. The second theme specifies that participants interpreted the images through a lens of preexisting assumptions. The third theme captures the social comparisons that were made while viewing the images. Results are explained in the context of weight stigmatization and health assumptions, body positivity and fat pride, and social comparison theory.