News
Professor Carson Researches Body Image
Body Image: The Influence of Ethnic Identity and Acculturation
2008
Alison Carson understands firsthand the challenges of successfully adapting to a new culture. Throughout her childhood, she moved with her family from Kenya to Surinam, Curaçao to the Philippines, the frequent relocations influencing her later interest in acculturation, the process an individual undergoes when moving from one culture to another.
The Hypothesis
Carson focused her study on a comparison of Hispanic/Latina and European-American women.1
Immigration patterns suggest that within 20 years, Spanish-speaking immigrants will be the dominant group in the United States, and Carson’s hope was to study changes in that sector as individuals move from one culture to another, thereby adding insight regarding the acculturation process. Her initial hypotheses encompassed four points:
• European-American women will have greater body dissatisfaction than Hispanic/Latinas.
• Females who have high ethnic identity will have lower body dissatisfaction.
• Females who are less identified with the dominant culture will have lower levels of body dissatisfaction.
• Females who are bicultural will have lower levels of body dissatisfaction.
Selecting the Sample
Manhattanville’s diverse student population presented an ideal pool from which to draw study participants. Among Manhattanville’s full-time undergraduate population, 16% self-identify as Hispanic, and from that group, 37 were chosen for the study, along with 37 European-Americans.
“Participants were allowed to identify and categorize themselves according to ethnic background,” says Carson. “We asked them where they were born and where their parents and grandparents were born to make sure they were not only self-identifying but also giving us information to categorize them in terms of their culture and their country of origin.”
The Hispanic/Latina group included women with backgrounds in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba. While some were foreign-born, others were first generation American. Conversely, the 37 European-American women were all born in the U.S. with parents and grandparents also born in the U.S.
As an assistant professor of cultural psychology at Manhattanville, Carson is now able to direct those interests through groundbreaking research studies. “Most of my research involves trying to understand how cultural context influences the way we think and behave, and what we do every day,” she says.
Students in Carson’s qualitative methods course engage in practical research, studying the experience of the blind on campus or how retirement community residents in nearby White Plains are affected when they join their peers on bingo night. “Our perspective,” Carson explains, “emphasizes a person’s experience and the role cultural context plays in that experience. If we can make a connection between context and experience, then we might be able to improve an individual’s experiences.”
Three of those students — Laura McDowell ’07, Gia Daino ’06, and Vanessa Gibens ’07 — joined with Carson over the past two years in research culminating in the soon-to-be-published monograph, “The Culture of Body and Body Image: A Comparison of Hispanic/Latina and European-American Women.”
“I hoped to understand how the process of acculturation might lead to changes in values about the body and about beauty and health,” Carson explains. “We also were interested in how the stress involved in that acculturation process might lead to obesity or the development of an eating disorder,” two rising trends among immigrants.
View the entire article by visiting Manhattanville Magazine online.
1Members of the Hispanic/Latina sample were defined as one ethnic group comprised of many racial groups. Members of the European-American sample were racially white but from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.