01
Perceptual
How athletes notice and describe their own bodies: strength, endurance, size, body fat, flexibility, and other characteristics.
A research project exploring how performance, appearance, social comparison, and sport-specific expectations shape body image in competitive high school athletes.
The project uses a multidimensional framework that treats body image as an interaction among how athletes perceive, think about, feel about, and act toward their bodies.
How athletes notice and describe their own bodies: strength, endurance, size, body fat, flexibility, and other characteristics.
Beliefs and standards about the “ideal” athletic body, including comparison with peers and expectations attached to a sport.
Confidence, satisfaction, discomfort, pressure, anxiety, or pride connected to the body and athletic performance.
Training, recovery, diet, body checking, and other choices athletes make in response to how they understand their bodies.
Participants often evaluated the same body as both a tool for performance and an object that is seen, compared, and judged.
Strength, speed, endurance, recovery, mobility, and sport-specific function were recurring ways athletes made sense of their bodies.
Even when performance came first, visual ideals and external judgment still shaped body satisfaction and comparison.
The coded interview material suggests that body image shifts with sport context, social comparison, and the athlete’s immediate performance goals.
Several athletes described the body through speed, strength, endurance, coordination, or readiness to compete rather than through appearance alone.
Athletes could prioritize performance while still wanting to look leaner, more muscular, or more recognizably “athletic.”
Peers, elite athletes, social media, and imagined judgments can shape standards for what a “good” body is supposed to look like.
Different sports reward different combinations of leanness, size, power, endurance, flexibility, and coordination.
Some coded responses explicitly described tradeoffs between an appearance goal and the body characteristics needed for sport performance.
For some athletes, feeling strong, prepared, or seeing athletic progress mattered more to confidence than matching an appearance ideal.
The new page lets viewers click through sport-specific patterns and inspect an interactive coding map built from the interview themes.
Click through Tennis, Hockey, Dance, and Cross Country to compare what each sport seems to reward, pressure, and normalize.
Open a dimension-by-dimension map of themes like strength identity, social comparison, appearance anxiety, and behavior change.
This version feels more like a student research site than a paper upload, which makes it stronger for readers, teachers, and portfolio viewers.
Short excerpts are shown without names to keep the focus on the pattern rather than the individual.
“Performance is more important to me.”
This showcase summarizes research material about body image and may reference weight, appearance pressure, and body-related behavior. It is designed as an academic presentation, not health advice.
The study is framed as qualitative and interpretivist, using semi-structured interviews so athletes can explain their experiences in their own words.
Focuses on lived experience, interpretation, and meaning around body image in competitive sport.
Questions span perceptual, cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions while leaving room for participants to elaborate.
The study considers individual sports, team sports, and aesthetic activity, including examples such as tennis, running, basketball, soccer, ice hockey, and dance.
Interview material is coded to identify recurring patterns, tensions, and meanings across participants.
Selected works cited in the draft introduction and research framing.
The norms and stability of new measures of the multidimensional body image construct. Body Image, 2(2), 199–203.
Thomas F. Cash: A multidimensional innovator in the measurement of body image. Body Image, 31, 198–203.
Comparison of eating disorder symptoms and body image between individual and team sport adolescent athletes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Eating Disorders, 10(1), 119.
Eating disorder risk in adolescent and adult female athletes: the role of body satisfaction, sport type, BMI, level of competition, and training background. BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, 15, 91.
Longitudinal evolution of physical activity type and eating and weight concerns among adolescents. Eating and Weight Disorders, 29, 75.
“Change needs to start at home”: A reflexive thematic analysis of girl athletes’ and coaches’ experiences of body image in New Delhi, India. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 76, 102774.
“You’re basically naked”: a qualitative study of why girls drop out of sport in their teenage years. Cogent Psychology, 12(1).
Appearance pressure, body image, and nutrition practices in youth athletes: Implications for performance. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.