Sociodemographic Variables in Relation to Social Appearance Anxiety in Adolescents.

Abstract

This study examined the effects of gender, age, grade level, and the educational level of the mother and father on social appearance anxiety in Turkish adolescents. This was a crosssectional study in which a simple random sampling method was used. Participants were 2,219 adolescents (1089 boys, 1130 girls) with a mean age of 12.76 years old (SD= .96) from the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades and recruited from twenty-one state secondary schools and one private secondary school in Amasya. The Social Appearance Anxiety Scale (Hart et al., 2008) and Sociodemographic Information Form were used as data collection instruments. Five hypotheses were tested in this study. Results showed that gender and age did not produce any significant differences in social appearance anxiety scores. There were, however, significant differences in social appearance anxiety scores in relation to the grade level of the adolescents and the educational level of their parents. Some surprising results are contrary to those reported in Western adolescents which means that culture may play an important role in the development of social appearance anxiety in adolescents.