Barbie Dolls and Girls' Body Image: A Study Review

Introduction

I'm fat. I want to be thinner. I want longer legs. I want a perkier butt and breasts. I want straight hair. I want curly hair. I want a smaller nose. I want more toned calves. I wish I were taller. These are very familiar thoughts to most girls — and a lot of boys, too. These thoughts plagued me most heavily during and immediately after puberty. I was embarrassed about my maturing body and wished I were developing faster while simultaneously wishing I weren't developing at all.

It's an important issue because body dissatisfaction results in negative self-perception, depressed mood, and disordered eating (Dittmar, Halliwell, & Ive, 2006). It remains something of a mystery what gets girls started thinking this way, and when — or at least it has been until a study by Helga Dittmar, Emma Halliwell, and Suzanne Ive examined this question in relation to outside influences like Barbie dolls.

Article Summary and Research Questions

The study was a quasi-experimental look at the causal relationship between Barbie dolls and negative body image. Barbie is not an arbitrary target; she is singled out for her longevity, ubiquity, unattainable proportions, and status as a tool of socialization. According to the article, if she were life-size, she would be the skinniest woman in 100,000 — skinnier than anorexics, and so underweight that she would not be able to menstruate. Her other proportions — legs and breasts — are even more wildly unrealistic. As a control, the researchers used the doll Emme, a collectors' doll of size-16 proportions, and also neutral images containing no dolls at all.

Dittmar, Halliwell, and Ive's specific research questions addressed whether images of Barbie have an immediate negative impact on five- to eight-year-old girls' body image, whether exposure to a more reasonably proportioned doll like Emme produces the same detrimental effects, and how exposure to neutral images compares. They chose five- to eight-year-old girls based on a 2003 conclusion that girls begin wanting to be thin around age six (Lowes & Tiggemann, 2003).

Methodology

The research instruments used were the Revised Body Esteem Scale (R-BES) and a questionnaire with pictorial measures of body size, both designed to be suitable for young children. The R-BES measured children's thoughts and feelings about their appearance and how they believed others perceived them; it had a split-half reliability coefficient of r = .85. The pictorial measure — in which girls selected the figure that best represented their actual body size, their ideal body size, and the body size they would like as adults — had test-retest reliability coefficients of r = .71 for actual size, r = .59 for ideal size, and r = .55 for ideal adult size.

The researchers used a sample of 162 girls, ages five to eight, from a predominantly white, middle-class school in East Sussex, UK. The age groups (five to six, six to seven, and seven to eight) were roughly equal in size, and the three randomly assigned treatment groups within each age group were also roughly equal. The girls were taken out of class two or three at a time, and the experimenter read them a story after explaining that participation was optional, there were no wrong answers, and their answers would be kept secret.

Each girl received a storybook of laminated, spiral-bound pages about a shopping excursion. The books were identical except for the presence of Barbie doll images, Emme doll images, or no doll images at all. The story was read aloud, and the books were collected afterward so that all girls had the same amount of time with the images.