Usually, girls who are comfortable with a certain "clique" in high school will either try to seek out that same status (if it was a "high ranking" one i.e. Mean Girls) or will try to seek out a higher status (if they felt left out in high school). Birds of a feather flock together you know. The behaviors that she described can be attributed to any group of women...not just sorority women. Athletic teams, female res halls or floors, people who sit together in the cafeteria, any women who feel as though they belong to a group (whether officially "defined" or not). In her article, she fully admits participating in these behaviors, which tells me she sought out the same type of status/clique that she was a part of in high school and then discovered that the playing field wasn't the same as HS. She couldn't attain that same status (look at all the references to what she did for the older sisters, and how the older sisters snubbed/excluded younger ones...I'm reading a sense of "Why can't I be on their level?" there) even though she tried by running errands, etc. to win their favor.
We can't deny that there are sorority women out there behaving this way. But I doubt that their behavior started as soon as they joined a sorority. It's also not a sorority specific problem, and it doesn't start on the college level. Maybe her future articles could look into that.
Quote:
She did this by measuring girls' self esteem -- comparing the levels of body dissatisfaction of girls who went through sorority recruitment with girls who had opted not to, and found that those who rushed were more likely to have a poor self-image.
I can tell you, maybe some freshman girls who aren't in the Greek system DO have poor body image, but the ones going through sorority recruitment ALL think they're too fat, too tall, too short, too flat-chested -- and not hot enough to go to the frat parties.
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I'm going to have to read this study to be able to fully comment, but I'm seeing some faulty logic here. First of all, she can't say ALL freshmen going through recruitment have body image issues because statistically that can't be true (and we've seen threads here on GC from PNMs who apparently think they're the shiznit). But you'd also have to look at scads more data to develop a cause/effect relationship between body image and recruitment. If the women were in the middle of recruitment at the time they were surveyed, they were at a heightened sense of being judged as well as judging the chapters, and therefore may have judged themselves more harshly. Recruitment also brings up insecurities of being rejected, which could have affected their responses. Also, you have to look at the sample pool...one university. Could that university have a freshmen class that rank higher in body image issues as compared to the rest of the United States? I don't think recruitment is the variable here (but I'll stop geeking out now).
(Plus, her article linked not to the actual study, but an article on a website called "The Frisky, who wrote a very short article about the study. If you're gonna talk about the results of a scientific study, don't read an article about it. READ THE ACTUAL STUDY and then interpret. The end.)
PsychTau
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