Objectified body consciousness and mental health in female adolescents: cross-cultural evidence from Georgian and Swiss national samples.

PURPOSE

The current study tested both descriptive and explanatory similarities and differences in a latent objectified body consciousness (OBC) construct and its relationship to three mental health indicators among Georgian and Swiss adolescents. Few studies have been conducted on adolescents; similarly, most work has been completed on U.S. college-age women.

METHODS

School-based questionnaire data were collected from a total of 18,239 adolescents in Georgia (n = 9,499) and Switzerland (n = 8,740), following the same protocol. Participants rated three measures of OBC (body shame, body surveillance, and appearance control beliefs) and three mental health indicators (depressive symptoms, somatic complaints, and suicidal ideation). Final study samples included 2,657 (mean age = 16.4 years) and 3,803 female youth (mean age = 17.8 years), respectively. Data analyses included mean level comparisons, confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and multigroup invariance tests.

RESULTS

Findings provide support for a latent OBC construct across cultures, with partial evidence of cultural differences (one of two manifest indicators). By contrast, multigroup invariance tests provide consistent evidence of no differences in the relationships between the OBC latent construct and three mental health indicators between Georgian and Swiss samples.

CONCLUSION

Despite mean level differences, findings support a latent OBC construct in both cultures, perhaps slightly more so among Swiss youth. The links between OBC and mental health indicators were also invariant across the two cultures, providing greater support for a global or universal (vs. "cultured") framework of adolescent development related to the constructs and relationships studied.