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The Influence of Social Media on the Body Image of First Year Female Medical Students of University of Khartoum, 2022

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2024

Razan Farah*
Affiliation:
University of Khartoum, Faculty of Medicine, Khartoum, Sudan
*
*Presenting author.
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Abstract

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Aims

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other social media applications have become an integral component of everyone's social life, particularly among younger generations and adolescents. These social apps have been changing a lot of conceptions and beliefs in the population by representing public figures and celebrities as role models. The social comparison theory, which says that people self-evaluate based on comparisons with similar others, is commonly used to explore the impact of social media on body image. There is a need to study the influence of those social platforms on the body image as there has been an increase in body dissatisfaction in the recent years.

Methods

This was a cross sectional study that used a self administered questionnaire on a simple random sample of 133 female medical students of the first year. Data were analyzed using SPSS.

Results

Finding shows that the response rate was 75%. There was an association between social media usage and noticing how the person looks (p value = 0.022), but no significant association between social media use and body image influence or dissatisfaction was found.

Conclusion

This study implies more research under this topic in Sudan as the literature are scarce.

Type
1 Research
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal College of Psychiatrists

Footnotes

Abstracts were reviewed by the RCPsych Academic Faculty rather than by the standard BJPsych Open peer review process and should not be quoted as peer-reviewed by BJPsych Open in any subsequent publication.

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