(P22-033-24) Social Norms of Body Image for Young Women Over the Past Decade: A Text Mining Analysis of News Big Data

Objectives: Social norms about young women's body image are known to be an important factor influencing weight control behaviors and have been shown to change over time. In recent years, as young people's exposure to media has increased, its social influence has led to unhealthy weight management behaviors (UWMB). This study is aimed to explore current social norms regarding women's weight loss and compare them to 10 years ago through news data analysis.

Methods: This study used text mining techniques. The data was extracted from ‘Big Kinds’, a big data platform that collects Korean articles based on the search terms of “weight loss”. The articles were limited to those published in 2013~2014 and 2023~2024 and were categorized by gender and search period. Keywords were extracted from each article and preprocessed using synonyms and designated words. 'NetMiner', the big data analysis software, was used to analyze keywords using term frequency-inverse document frequency, word network, and topic modeling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm.

Results: Out of the 1,273 articles, 728 were in the 2010s and 545 were in the 2020s, with about 1.5 times more articles focused on women than men. In the 2010s, prevalent keywords included "food," "exercise," and "fat," with emergence of detoxes or crash diets, which pattern remained consistent across genders. In the 2020s, UWMBs such as appetite suppressant appeared, recognizing obesity as a "disease" that needed to be treated. There was also gender-specific differences emerged in weight loss objectives and practices. Women-focused articles centered on celebrity figures or flight attendants, emphasizing appearance, and frequently discussing "diet pills," "overdose," and "surgery”. Conversely, men's articles placed less emphasis on structural factors like social norms and leaned towards healthy practices such as diet, weightlifting, and aerobic exercise.

Conclusions: Maintaining healthy weight is crucial from an early age, but UWMB among young women has become more common in recent years. Furthermore, women seem to be more affected by social influences regarding body image compared to men. A thorough examination of influencing factors, which should include structural factors, is suggested.

Funding Sources: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT).