Synopsis
As attitudes towards fat people are changing, old instruments to measure public opinion on fat people are becoming less useful: common limitations include only measuring negative opinions and using stigmatizing language. The Fat Attitudes Assessment Toolkit (FAAT) was created by Patricia Cain, Ngaire Donaghue, and Graeme Ditchburn to reflect these changes.
The research was divided into three studies. Study 1 consisted of developing a set of items on attitudes toward fatness, which were subsequently reviewed by 110 fat studies scholars and the community; then examined using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) in multiple iterations (Cain et al., 2022). The final pool had 106 items to measure 7 factors (Cain et al., 2022).
Study 2 tested the item pool through a sample of 751 American adults by employing EFA and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) (Cain et al., 2022). This produced 9 scales based on factors: Empathy, Activism Orientation, Size Acceptance, Attractiveness, Critical Health, General Complexity, Socioeconomic Complexity, Responsibility, and Body Acceptance, with each scale including 4 to 8 items (Cain et al., 2022).
The repeatability of FAAT scores was measured in Study 3 by the same participants over a two-week period. Through subscale score correlation analysis and a two-tailed paired samples t-test, it has been discovered that FAAT has sufficient test-retest reliability (Cain et al., 2022).
FAAT is considered a research instrument that will not legitimize fat negativity by employing stigmatizing language. Furthermore, depending on the research question, the FAAT’s nine subscales can be used independently.
Body Image, Physical Activity, and Sport: A Scoping Review
Synopsis
The authors C. M. Sabiston, E. Pila, M. Vani, and C. Thogersen-Ntoumani have chosen to explore the relationship between physical activity, sport, and body image through a scoping review. The aim was to provide a wider perspective on the literature and to inspire new research topics.
For the purposes of the review, the authors manually searched for peer-reviewed empirical articles describing research involving human subjects. The articles had to be published between 2008 and 2018 in one of five databases: MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO and CINAHL, Gender Studies, and Sport Discus. Out of 28,575 search results across the databases, 210 articles were included in the review, out of which 182 employed quantitative methods, 26 employed qualitative methods, and 2 employed both (Sabiston et al., 2018). The key data regarding measurements of body image, physical activity, and main findings were extracted and put into a table. The data was then analyzed qualitatively while taking research, policy, and practice implications into account.
As a result, sports and physical activity engagement were linked to a more positive and less critical body image. However, null associations between physical activity or sport and body image were reported in 13.7% of the quantitative research (Sabiston et al., 2018). Following consultation with important stakeholders, it was determined that it was important to further explore the relationship between body image, physical activity, and sport because the existing studies have a limited scope. Overall, it has been shown that the association between body image, physical activity, and sport is complex, causal, bi-directional, and reciprocal (Sabiston et al., 2018).
The findings of the two articles can be summarized by stating that the research in the domain of body image has been inconclusive so far. Therefore, to further the research, new instruments, such as FAAT, are being created.
References
Cain, P., Donaghue, N., & Ditchburn, G. (2022). Development and validation of the Fat Attitudes Assessment Toolkit (FAAT): A multidimensional nonstigmatizing measure of contemporary attitudes toward fatness and fat people. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1–25. Web.
Sabiston, C. M., Pila, E., Vani, M., & Thogersen-Ntoumani, C. (2018). Body image, physical activity, and sport: A scoping review. Psychology of Sport and Exercise. 42, 48–57. Web.