The role of satisfaction with the way that you look in health and well-being evaluations among 10 to 12 year olds: A gender and cross-cultural analysis

Abstract:

Satisfaction with the way that you look is among the less valued life satisfactions domains among more than 93,000 children aged 10 to 12 belonging to 35 countries and recruited through a representative sampling procedure in the context of the Children’s Worlds project. Satisfaction with the way that you look also makes a rather important contribution to satisfaction with life as whole and even more to satisfaction with health. This suggests that interventions aimed to feeling better with oneself should be part of public policies to improve health and well-being at these ages.

Differences among age groups and genders are outstanding as well as they are among countries. Thus, a decreasing with age trend from 10 to 12 is observed in satisfaction with the way that you look. In most countries girls express to be significantly less satisfied with the way that they look compared to boys. The variability in the mean range for this life domain among countries oscillates in more than 2 points in a 0-10 point-scale. The results point to the need to take particular account of age, gender and cultural factors when designing interventions to increase satisfaction with the way that you look.

This communication will additionally explore to what extent satisfaction with the way that you look is mediating the relationship between satisfaction with health and satisfaction with life as whole and how the relationship between these variables is associated to gender and country of origin in the two age groups. The results are thought to expand knowledge on the contribution that satisfaction with the way that you look has for health and well-being evaluations at these ages, as well as helping to adopt a broader and more preventive approach to improve them.

Biography:

Dr. Mònica González-Carrasco is full professor in social psychology at the University of Girona (Catalonia, Spain). She’s the co-coordinator of the research team on Childhood, Adolescence, Children’s Rights and their Quality of Life and researcher at the Quality of Life Research Institute. Her main areas of research are children’s and adolescents’ subjective well-being and children’s right to social participation. She’s involved in the Children’s Worlds, International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeB) (https://isciweb.org/), aimed to collect solid and representative data on children’s lives and daily activities, their time use and in particular on their own perceptions and evaluations of their well-being.