Middle Grade School Structure and Young Adolescent Girls' Body Image

Jacklyn Sullivan

In 1997, The New York Times quoted a Bronx High School of Science administrator regarding the then- surprising increase in behavioral science honorees in the prestigious Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Talent Search competition: ‘It [behavioral science] does provide another outlet for some students whose strength may not be in empirical science and math,’ said the chairwoman of the school’s biology department (A Fine Hour For Squishy Sciences, NYT 2/16/97). Oh really? I thought my diverse fifteen hundred subject sample population and multiple analysis of covariance-based statistical analyses were pretty darned scientific. Silly me. I was also impressed with the way my friend at a local school developed and piloted her own instruments in two languages, using factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha. A professor in California has asked permission to use the instruments in her own future research among Latino/a adolescents. It’s been fifteen years since the Times article, which otherwise offered a very positive review of all the wonderful work being done by young social scientists. Hopefully, we’re all past this squishy science / hard science nonsense. At heart, I’m a physicist. Nothing I’ve read in the last three years has excited me more than last week’s ‘Higgs boson’ discovery, but at 16 or 17, I lacked both the expertise and the opportunity to talk my way into an internship in Geneva. Social science represented an important area where I could both apply and develop my skills to an important project one that could actually make a tangible difference to girls not much younger than myself . . . Has the movement to reform middle grade education had unexpected social consequences for preteen girls struggling with self-esteem, body and weight issues? This study examined body-consciousness and sociocultural appearance attitudes among 1537 girls in seven different towns with three different grade groupings: Middle School (K-5/6-8), Modified Middle School (K-4/5-8); and Junior High (K-6/7-8). Do grade groupings within school districts affect the age at which girls become body-conscious? Do girls in Middle School districts report worse body image than those in Junior High districts?