Measuring students' perceptions of themselves provides valuable insights into their self-concept and self-awareness. Understanding how they view their abilities and strengths helps schools tailor interventions to boost confidence, cultivate a positive self-image, and encourage personal growth.
In recent years, researchers have estimated that concerns about body appearance do not only affect females but males as well. The latest research has estimated that the number of boys engaging in weight loss strategies range from 21.5 to 50%: one-third of adolescent boys prefers a thinner body size, and another one-third prefers a larger and more muscular body (Choane & Pope, 2001; Furnhman & Calnan, 1998; McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2001, 2003, 2004).
Moreover, McCabe and Ricciardelli (2005a) indicated that already at the age of eight, boys focus on increasing the size of their muscles and are already receiving messages to achieve this goal. Gender differences are clear: boys focus on the muscular apparatus, while girls focus on weight loss and body image and appearance.
The Body Esteem Scale focuses on 3 areas - (1) Appearance: the general feeling about appearance; (2) Weight: weight satisfaction; (3) Attribution: the evaluation attributed to others about one’s own body and appearance
30-items to assess an individual’s tendency to engage in social comparison in domains related to the body, eating, and exercise.
The development of a healthy eating style and physical fitness regimen in adolescence or adulthood might be contingent on physical self-concept in childhood. This scale assesses Global physical self-concept and subscales of Physical Performance, Physical Appearance, and Weight Control behaviours in children 6 to 11 years of age.
Physical self-concept is considered to be an important psychological outcome, and factors associated with the self regulation of physical activity such as attitudes and intention Importantly, physical self-concept is viewed as an important contributor to perceptions of self-worth in multidimensional, hierarchical models of self-esteem.
The physical self is defined as an individual’s perception of himself or herself in aspects of physical domains such as strength, endurance, sport ability, and physical appearance.
The Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-3 (SATAQ-3) is one of the most commonly used self-report measures of endorsement of Western appearance ideals. This 30-item self-report measure provided four subscales: Information (nine items; e.g., “TV programs are an important source of information about fashion and being attractive”), Pressures (seven items; e.g., “I’ve felt pressure from TV or magazines to lose weight”), Internalization—General (nine items; e.g., “I compare my body to the bodies of TV and movie stars”), and Internalization—Athlete (five items; e.g., “I try to look like sports athletes”). The SATAQ-3 has been used in many populations including adolescents, college students, and community samples.
The General Self-Efficacy Scale is correlated to emotion, optimism, work satisfaction. Negative coefficients were found for depression, stress, health complaints, burnout, and anxiety. It has been found that a strong sense of personal efficacy is related to better health, higher achievement and better social integration
Being that body image results from a coming together of different factors, the Adolescent Body Image Satisfaction Scale for males (ABISS) helps to identify 3 subscales that attend to how adolescent males perceive their body image.
The first subscale, body competence, helps explain how people may place value in the development of their body from a positive perspective. Closely related to body competence, body inadequacy emerged as the second subscale. For example, feeling ignored, intimidated, and unattractive by other people demonstrates how an adolescent may develop a negative body image.
Other factors, such as feeling insecure and weak, also relate to feeling inadequate relative to a social standard of comparison. Internal conflict was a third subscale that emerged and includes 4 items that capture the balance between an adolescent’s positive and negative perceptions of body image. For example , being critical of one’s body, and seeking reassurance from others concerning appearance
