Enhancing body image satisfaction and well-being among early adolescents: Feasibility and preliminary outcomes of the mind. body. voice. program.

Although most research has emphasized high-school and college-aged women, body dissatisfaction and eating disorder behavior are also a concern for middle-school girls. We partnered with Girls Inc., a community-based organization to explore feasibility and preliminary outcomes of the mind. body. voice. (m.b.v.) program with a middle-school-aged cohort. The program was collaboratively designed with youth, focusing on body image satisfaction, disordered eating risk factors, and mental health and well-being. The work occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a unique opportunity to assess the promise of the program under difficult extenuating circumstances. In an open-trial design, we assessed change from pre- to post-program administered with two cohorts, one delivered remotely in 2020 (n = 17) and one in-person in 2021 (n = 13). Findings indicated that participation in the m.b.v. program was associated among both cohorts with significant decreases in negative body judgment and adherence to cultural appearance biases, and significant increases in body awareness, agency, and positive self-regard, as well as significant reductions in negative affect. Results support the feasibility and promise of both remote and in-person administration of the program targeting young adolescents, and in partnership with a well-established community-based organization.

Developing the Sense of Belonging Scale and Understanding Its Relationship to Loneliness, Need to Belong, and General Well-Being Outcomes.

The construct of belonging has played a central role in psychological theories for many years, prompting research that benefits many people. However, there is little consensus for how to measure sense of belonging. We developed an 8-item measure of belonging that is easily adapted to specific contexts. The items capture a sense of being valued, accepted, included/connected, and fitting into a social environment. Study 1 examined candidate items and facilitated item selection. Study 2 demonstrated internal consistency and convergent validity of the scale. Loneliness and belonging were inversely correlated but each made independent contributions predicting general measures of well-being. Together, they fully mediated the effect of positive social contact on three of the four well-being measures. Study 3 experimentally demonstrated the differential sensitivity of specific (belonging at your university) and global (belonging in general) forms of the scale. Participants who wrote about an experience of inclusion relevant to a specific context reported more belonging than participants who wrote about an exclusion experience, but only on the specific, and not global, scale. The measure of belonging reported here is validated in adult samples; it is a flexible tool for research on the sense of belonging, its antecedents, and consequences.