A selective prevention study: Decreasing body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptomatology in sorority women using psychoeducation, social norms, and social marketing strategies

Female college students are at risk for developing a body image or eating disturbance and/or disorder. There, however, is a lack of effective prevention programs in the college population despite an increase in body image and eating disturbances. The main purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of three different intervention programs designed to decrease body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptomatology in sorority women. The final sample consisted of 146 participants from four sororities. Each sorority was randomly assigned an intervention program and one group was assigned to be the control. The intervention groups included a psychoeducation, a social norms, and a combined (psychoeducation and social norms) group. The intervention groups included two 1-hour presentations and exposure to positive messages regarding body image and eating behavior. The difference between the groups was in how the information was presented. That is, by providing psychoeducation information, by providing normative data for each sorority, or by using the combined approach. Both intervention and control group members completed measures of body satisfaction, appearance evaluation, eating attitudes and behaviors, internalization of the sociocultural ideal, pressure to obtain the sociocultural idea, self-esteem, and social norm questionnaires at pre and post-test.; Multilevel modeling was used to compare the effectiveness of the programs to the control group. The results indicated that the psychoeducational group significantly reduced eating disorder symptomatology and the combined group significantly increased positive body image attitudes and negative eating behaviors targeted in this study. The implications for these results are discussed, as are suggestions for future research in this area.