Interview with Dr. Megan Vendemia on Body Image and Social Media

By: Marlene Zuniga-Mata, Jasmine Gutierrez, & Michelle Martin-Soto

In this generation, social media has become a vast and ever-changing part of our lives. Content shared by celebrities (or now, influencers) sets stereotypes many people can not obtain, such as a perfect body, diet, and lifestyle. Doctor Megan Vendemia is one of many deeply interested in social media; fortunately, our team shares the same interest. We sought Dr. Vendemia to learn more about her perspective on the stigma around social media. We learned that although she broadly studies communication technology, she mainly focuses on social media’s effects on women. She first started digging deeper into social media during the beginning of her graduate studies. She felt as though social media was and still is the perfect place to study because of the modifications that happen time and time again. Through the interview we had with her, we learned more about her and how social media is a significant factor in women’s lives.

We are seeing greater divergence right now like the body positive movement and greater representation in the mainstream media, however, how women appear in magazines or television tends to reflect a really narrow set of appearance ideals

– Megan A. Vendemia

Q1: Why did you decide to do research on communication technology and social media?

Dr. Megan Vendemia decided to research communication technology and social media because she wanted to apply interpersonal theories to social media because of the social aspect and having a mass audience.

Q2: What are the biggest challenges when studying body image and social media, and how do you face them?

Dr. Megan Vendemia’s biggest challenge when studying body image and social media was wanting to study in a controlled way, as well as facing algorithms that are tailored to an individual’s experience and particular network. This can be a challenge in designing the study to reflect the body images that an individual might see and how it personally affects them. The body images themselves are another challenge because a social network might not involve images that are deemed problematic, and it might not be representative of everyone.

Q3: Why did you decide to create mock Instagram pages for this experiment?

Vendemia chose to create mock Instagram posts for the experiment because it is a platform where these types of images are available and occur in real life. She was most interested in image effects because Instagram is commonly used to post photos for followers and others to see. However, there were some challenges in having the study be based on Instagram because there is some presumption that some images on the platform may use filters or be digitally altered.

Q4: Why did you use quantitative methods instead of qualitative?

Dr. Megan Vendemia did the study in a quantitative way because an experiment would allow her to collect a larger sample of participants to get a representative sample of women who are particularly in the average age range of 20 years old who were similar to the images that were being shown. Getting a larger sample was important to say that the effects might translate on an average level across the population, and the data, in a qualitative way, would not have been as generalizable.

Q5: How was the process of recruiting undergraduate students at a large midwestern university? Were there any challenges?

Vendemia was fortunate that there was an undergraduate pool that she and her group were able to pull from for the study. At Ohio State University, Dr. Megan Vendemia had an infrastructure in place to collect samples from students who gained course credit for participating in the research. Because of this incentive, it was very easy to get students to participate which was representative of their target audience, college students.

Q6: Why do you focus on women?

Dr. Megan Vendemia mentions that feminine psychology, such as objectification theory and work in the body image realm, has spoken to how these effects are unique to the experience of women and girls. Historically, women in media have been set in a narrow set of appearance ideals that are more harmful to women than men. She also mentioned that if a body is a central focus and partially sexualized images in media, that can potentially be an effect that is unique to women’s experience. However, Vendemia mentions how it is also essential to have work focusing on men and other groups.

Q7: How would you do this study today? 

If Dr. Megan Vendemia were to do this study today, she would look for a broader representation of the women she was using to see how race potentially intersects with the effects of body image. The images used in the experiment were predominantly white women, and this study sample was from Ohio State University, which was also a predominantly white sample. She would also like to replicate this study with men to see if she can get similar effects, although it’s challenging since men tend to have a broad set of appearance ideals. Also, wanting to know more about how the images used in the study reflected people’s real-life experiences. 

Q8: How do you think social media has changed between 2018 to 2024

Vendemia mentioned increasing of following celebrities, influencers, getting sponsored content within one’s content, and algorithms that tailor your experience, making social media platforms more addicting. In 2018 and prior, people were following and posting content to people they know, whereas today, the feelings of controllability around what is presented of oneself are a little less. 

Q9: What advice would you give someone researching and gathering data on body image and social media?

Vendemia talked about how body image research can be a sensitive topic to talk about in terms of people being more sensitive to the questions being asked, so research ethics is necessary to keep in mind. It’s also essential to remember the challenge of people’s preconceived notions of their own experience they bring to the table.

In Conclusion

After speaking to Dr. Megan Vendemia about her experience and studies on social media and body image, we better understand how to navigate a sensitive topic. Social media is on the rise with new apps and updates coming out, and it comes with body image effects that are important to talk about. It was fantastic to hear about her experience during her research and how she overcame the challenges she faced when conducting her experiment. With her advice, when we acquire quantitative data, we know ethically how to research people’s experience with social media and how it affects their body image perception. We thank Dr. Vendemia for letting us interview her and giving us a better direction on completing our survey on social media’s impact on young adults’ body image perception. After reading her incredible work and this interview, it’s easily recognizable that she has a passion for this topic, which is inspiring to hear and excites us for our research. 

We highly recommend reading the research study we discussed with Dr. Megan Vendemia titled “The effects of viewing thin, sexualized selfies on Instagram: Investigating the role of the image source and awareness of photo editing practices.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144518300755#:~:text=Selfies%20posted%20by%20peers%2C%20compared,more%20negatively%20women%20were%20evaluated.