Lerner, Baker, and Lerner's (1985) Goodness-of-Fit model was adopted as a framework to investigate the influence of varied contexts (football and society) and associated body type ideals on body image. Determining that expectations concerning players' body types existed in the context of football tested the first assumption of the model; both mesomorphic and endomorphic body types were desired. The second assumption was framed by considering that players either match or mismatch the body ideal of each context. Out of 145 participants, 68% matched the expectations of both contexts, 30% mismatched at least one context, and 2% mismatched both contexts. The last assumption maintains that an individual will receive positive feedback if he matches the expectations of a context, resulting in positive psychosocial adjustment, and negative feedback because of a mismatch will result in negative psychosocial adjustment if a mismatch occurs. Our data contradicted the first component of this last assumption; the majority of participants who mismatched one or both contexts reported positive feedback scores (72.3%). The second component was supported, however, as participants who received positive feedback from both contexts generated the highest body image scores (M = 4.08, SD = 0.64) as compared to those who reported negative feedback in one or both contexts (M = 3.61, SD = 0.81, d = 0.69). Unique to this study was questioning the role that valuing the context played. Higher body image scores were observed for participants who valued society, both contexts, or neither context combined compared to participants who valued the sport context alone (M = 4.02, SD = 0.65; M = 3.81, SD = 0.84, respectively). Due to the small effect (d = 0.28), however, value might not add to this model.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/26880 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Cross, Dana K |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 76 p. |
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