Review of ‘Body image in female professional and amateur dancers’

‘Body image in female professional and amateur dancers’ is a research project included in the publication ‘Research into Dance Education Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2010’ and was carried out by Elisana Pollatou, Marios Goudas and Yannis Theodorakis of the University of Thessaly, Trikala, Greece and Nikoleta Bakali of Democritus University of Thrace, Komotini, Greece. This research looks to find out whether there is a difference between body images of female amateur dancers and female professional dancers.

They use the work of Slade (1994) to define body image,

“[Body image is] the picture we have in our minds of the size, shape and form of our bodies, and our feelings concerning characteristics and our constituent body parts” Slade (1994)

200 dancers participated in this research; 115 females between 15 and 30 who attend a professional dance schools in Athens and dance approximately 30 hours per week and 85 females within the same age range who attend amateur dance schools and dance approximately 5 hours a week.

The team used questionnaires to determine the dancers’ body image. The questionnaires they used were the ‘Multidimentional Body Self Relation Questionnaire’ or MBSRQ which was developed by Thomas F. Cash (2000). Cash’s website http://www.body-images.com/ explains that he has been a clinical and research psychologist for over 35 years and his work mainly focuses on physical appearance. The researchers used the MBSRQ to find out the participants attitudes towards a number of areas to do with body image. According to the MBSRQ User’s manual the MBSRQ includes these factor subscales: Appearance Evaluation; Appearance Orientation; Fitness Evaluation; Fitness Orientation; Health Evaluation; Health Orientation; Illness Orientation. Also, according to Cash the questionnaire provides additional subscales,

Additional MBSRQ subscales include: Body Areas Satisfaction; Overweight Preoccupation; and SelfClassified Weight” Cash (2000)

The results for this research were as follows:

1)    Professional dancers had higher mean scores than the amateurs on fitness orientation

2)    Professional dancers had higher mean scores than the amateurs on body area dissatisfaction

3)    Amateur dancers had higher mean scores than the professionals on overweight preoccupation

4)    There was no significant association with the remaining MBSRQ subscales.

The findings indicate that the professional dancers were more physically fit and are more satisfied with areas of their bodies because higher scores on fitness orientation indicates a higher level of fitness and higher scores on body area dissatisfaction indicates they are more satisfied with areas of their bodies. However, the professionals are more preoccupied with being overweight.

This research piece is relevant to my inquiry as it looking into dancers’ body image and was published in 2010 and therefore the results were found recently making them relevant to the topic now. I thought this research was interesting as it looked at both professional dancers and amateur dancers. At the end of the piece the team write how it might be an idea to use professional dancers and non-dancers in future research so that they can view both ends of the scales. I agree this would be a good idea because it would be one step further from the research they carried out this time. Yet, I think that looking at these two different types of dancer could have produced some interesting results.

However, the results found were quite basic. Most of the subscales in the questionnaire did not supply any significant association and the results the team did find were very basic. I think it is rather obvious that professional dancers training 30 hours per week will, on average, have a higher level of physical fitness than dancers who only dance for 5 hours per week.

I think that the MBSRQ was a good starting point and Thomas F. Cash who created the questionnaire has many years of experience in this field so I believe that the questionnaire must have been thorough. However, perhaps the team could have carried their research further to perhaps find out more on the topic.

Having said that, this piece was published in ‘Research into Dance Education’ and so the editors must have thought the findings to be interesting enough to include it in their publication especially because this publication is aimed at teachers, lectures and other researchers.

This research only looks at dancers in Greek schools too. So it could be argued that the results found are site specific perhaps the results would differ if it had been carried out in Britain for example and this makes it less relevant to my inquiry.