Fünf Fragen an... Kristen Harrison
I have always been interested in the effects of cultural practices on health. So many cultural practices are detrimental to health, and many of these practices are learned from mass media sources in youth. My research on mass media effects on body image and eating disorders was inspired by a desire to understand how young people can be driven to attain media-communicated cultural ideals at the cost of their own health and well-being.
I am currently conducting a longitudinal study linking television viewing and magazine reading with the development of discrepancies between children's perceptions of their actual body and the body they would ideally like to have, and the consequences thereof (e.g., disordered eating). The goal is to understand the media's influence on disordered eating from a developmental perspective.
I used to understand health communication as all communication that was intended to have a positive impact on message receivers' health, but now I understand it to mean all communication that has an effect on health, positive or negative, intended or unintended. My work focuses on negative, often unintended, effects of commercial communication.
This issue is often presented as one of opinion, but it's no more a question of opinion than is the question of smoking and lung cancer. It's an empirical question, and research exists to answer it. The fact is that exposure to ideal-body media results in increased depression, body dissatisfaction, and eating pathology among young audience members. This effect is modest, however, and needs to be considered in context; peer and family influences may be more important. Also, certain audience members are more vulnerable than others. For girls and young women who are achievement-oriented and tend to compare themselves to others, watching such programming could have significant negative effects.
The reality of the situation is that advertisers profit from making audience members insecure. A woman who is truly happy with herself and her body is not motivated to buy products to alter herself. Given that context and the fact that I would need advertising to support my station, I would try to offset the potential negative effects of the advertising with programming that focuses on what the body can do rather than what it looks like. I would also run programming emphasizing storylines that focus less on appearance and more on personality, friendships, love, careers, faith, service, and so forth.
Assistant Professor
Department of Speech Communication
The University of Illinois
131 Lincoln Hall, Urbana, IL 61801
Tel. 001-217 244 7536
E-mail: krishar@uiuc.edu
Department of Speech Communication