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Happy Being Me: outcomes of a peer-based body dissatisfaction prevention intervention in young adolescent girls

This study aimed to examine body dissatisfaction and risk factor outcomes following participation in Happy Being Me, a 6-lesson peer-based prevention intervention for young adolescent girls. Participants were 491 female year 7 students randomly allocated to the Happy Being Me intervention condition (N=295) or control condition (N=196). Self-report questionnaire data was collected at baseline, post-program, and 6- and 12-month follow-up. Preliminary data analyses for the incomplete sample indicate baseline to 6-month follow-up improvements for internalisation of the thin ideal (F = 5.38 (1, 332), p = .021), appearance comparisons (F = 10.21 (1, 312), p = .002), and media literacy (F = 15.98 (1, 327), p < .001) in the Happy Being Me intervention condition relative to the control condition. Reductions in the intervention condition were not significantly different from the control condition for weight and shape concern (F = 0.28 (1, 313), p = .599) or body dissatisfaction (F = 2.48 (1, 313), p = .116). Twelve-month follow-up data will be presented for the complete sample. The results from this study provide preliminary evidence for positive outcomes following participation in a classroom delivered multi-component peer-based body dissatisfaction prevention intervention.

This abstract was presented in the Prevention stream of the 2013 ANZAED Conference.

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Correspondence to Sian McLean.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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McLean, S., Paxton, S. & Wertheim, E. Happy Being Me: outcomes of a peer-based body dissatisfaction prevention intervention in young adolescent girls. J Eat Disord 1 (Suppl 1), O33 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-1-S1-O33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-1-S1-O33

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