ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA PRESSURE ON BODY IMAGE AND EATING ATTITUDE AMONG IIUM FEMALE STUDENTS

Abstract

Introduction: This paper aims to determine the association between social media pressure on body image and the eating attitude of IIUM female students. Methods: 167 Female undergraduate students of International Islamic University, Malaysia (IIUM) were chosen to participate in this study. A set of questionnaires on students’ sociodemographic, anthropometric, social media pressure (SATAQ-3) and eating attitude (EAT-26) were distributed to them. Results: The majority of the respondents (57.5%) had high social media pressure that affected their body image. The rest reported experiencing moderate and low social media pressure, with 31.7% and 10.8%, respectively. For eating attitude, 64.7% of respondents had a normal eating attitude, whereas 35.3% had an at-risk eating attitude problem. There was a significant correlation between social media pressure on body image and eating attitude of IIUM female students; the p-value was less than 0.001, r-value was 0.486. Conclusions: This study proved that social media triggers pressure through its contents and users that overly-favour on lean body image rather than a thick body image. Other than that, an individual’s eating attitude is influenced by internal and external factors such as cognitive thinking, social media contents, body mass index (BMI), and field of study. Lastly, since there was a positive correlation between social media pressure on body image and eating attitude, this means that the higher the social media pressure, the higher the tendency to develop an abnormal eating attitude.