Sociocultural influences on body dissatisfaction and dieting in Hong Kong girls

Abstract

We investigated the relationship of sociocultural influences (SI) promoting thinness (parental, peer and media pressures for thinness, and individual value for modernity), age and body mass Index (BMI) to body dissatisfaction (BD) and dieting in 294 Hong Kong community adolescent girls. We proposed that BD mediated SI's relationship with dieting. In bivariate analyses, all variables were significantly (p≤.05) related to BD (β's from 0.14 to 0.59), and, except for modernity, to dieting (β's from 0.17 to 0.51). In multivariate analyses, peer (β=0.32, p