Bodies and Behaviours: A Study of Body Image in Adolescent Girls and the Canadian Church
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is an interdisciplinary study that applies Christian feminist theology and health sciences’ insights to the results of a study concerning adolescent girls and body image. The desire of adolescent girls to be thin is inherently connected to their desire for wholeness, acceptance and unconditional love, and the promise of Christianity reaches a wholeness of this depth. And yet, the reality of the church’s relationship to the female body often results in destructive patterns of low body image and emotional health. Thus, using quantitative methods, we employed a large and representative sample of Canadian adolescent girls to: (1) investigate how often they report healthy and unhealthy images of their bodies; (2) relate perceptions of body image to self-reported adiposity (body mass index or BMI) status; (3) relate perceptions of body image to diets and other measures used to control body weight; and (4) to determine whether the above perceptions and relationships are modified by participation in church or religious groups. We present an initial overview of our findings that suggest that church involvement does not protect adolescent girls from modern challenges with body image. We then go on to consider the possible relationship between these findings and contemporary theologies. Practical implications for the practice of spiritual care are also identified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".