In today´s society health is important as well as central. The concept is wide and includesaspects concerning food, body, weight, appearance and lifestyle. What health is and is not canbe hard to know and the interpretation is affected by social processes. There can be anambiguity about what the concept means and stands for. In today’s society there exists severalmessages about health for the individual to relate to, and these are in addition affected bynorms and ideals that affects the interpretation of the health-concept. Since young women are a relevant group when it comes to this subject, the purpose of thisstudy is to examine what norms about health young women must deal with in their everydaylife. A further purpose is to create an understanding about how these norms affects youngwomen and what consequences they cause regarding how they feel about themselves and theirlives.The theories used as framework are theories by Giddens focused on concepts asreflexivity, identity and lifestyle. Furthermore, the perspectives of symbolic interactionismand the labeling theory are applied. The result is presented using four different themes emerging from the analysis of sixsemistrucured interviews with young women aged 20-30. The themes are the following: theconcept of health creates demands, the society is characterized by skinny norms and ideals,food is valued as good and bad and that you, according to the society, are good when youexercise and loose weight. The conclusion drawn is that there exist norms that have negativeimpact on how young women feel about themselves and their lives. The results show thatnorms about health can create the opposite effect as the norms about what helth means andsymbolize can cause bad health instead of good health.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-103439 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Ekelius, Kajsa |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsstudier (SS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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