Dissertation
Indications of Disruption: Mixed Methods Insights into Women's Experiences of Embodiment
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000006338
Abstract
The purpose of this project was to explore how certain socially informed individual factors relate to women’s positive embodiment and how a socially informed situation can impact women’s positive embodiment. Embodiment as conceptualized using the developmental theory of embodiment is a multidimensional construct at the crossroads between dominant social structures and individual’s embodied practices (Piran, 2017; Piran et al., 2020). We explored these relationships and impacts over two studies. In study one, we explored the relationships between women’s positive embodiment, internalized weight biases, and mindfulness. We also tested whether moderation or mediation models best fit the data. Results indicate that internalized weight bias significantly negatively relates with all dimensions of embodiment as well as with mindfulness. Partial mediation was supported. Internalized weight bias partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness monitoring and positive embodiment as well as the relationship between mindfulness acceptance and positive embodiment. Moderation was not supported for either mindfulness monitoring or mindfulness acceptance. These results imply that increased trait mindfulness helps to improve women’s positive embodiment by reducing the internalization of weight biases, and not by reducing the relationship between internalized weight bias and positive embodiment. In study two, we used parallel mixed-methods to examine and explore how a socially informed situation can impact women’s embodiment. Women were surveyed and interviewed on their experiences with trying on clothes in a dressing room. Surveys had a between-subjects experimental design, and interviews were semi-structured. We found that women, in a scenario where they imagined fitting into pants two sizes larger than they were expecting, had significantly lower general affect, lower core affect pleasure, lower positive emotions, and higher negative emotions than in the other scenarios. Additionally, women in a control scenario reported significantly lower state body surveillance than the dressing room scenarios. From interviews we found that women’s experiences with dressing rooms were largely negative, included aspects of all but one dimension of embodiment, and reflected the complexity of the construct. Overall, our results reinforce the multidimensionality of the experience of embodiment, and the complexity of the dialectical relationship between these experiences and “macro” level social factors.
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Details
- Title
- Indications of Disruption
- Creators
- Susan Williams
- Contributors
- Anne Cox (Advisor)Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson (Committee Member)Alexis Tan (Committee Member)Stacey Hust (Committee Member)Sarah Ullrich-French (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Graduate School
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 135
- Identifiers
- 99901087336101842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation