Abstract
Background
Given that most young women with eating disorders do not receive treatment, implementing effective prevention programs is a public health priority. The Body Project is a group-based eating disorder prevention program with evidence of both efficacy and effectiveness. This trial evaluated the efficacy of this prevention program with Brazilian girls, as no published study has tested whether this intervention is culturally sensitive and efficacious with Latin-American adolescents.
Methods
Female students were allocated to a dissonance-based intervention (n = 40) or assessment-only (n = 22) condition. The intervention was a dissonance-based program, consisted of four group sessions aimed to reduce thin-ideal internalization. The sessions included verbal, written, and behavioral exercises. The intervention group was evaluated at pretest and posttest; assessment-only controls completed measures at parallel times.
Results
Compared to assessment-only controls, intervention participants showed a significantly greater reduction in body dissatisfaction, sociocultural influence of the media, depressive symptoms, negative affect, as well as significantly greater increases in body appreciation. There were no significant effects for disordered eating attitudes and eating disorder symptoms.
Conclusions
These results suggest that this dissonance-based eating disorder prevention program was culturally sensitive, or at least culturally adaptive, and efficacious with Brazilian female adolescents. Indeed, the average effect size was slightly larger than has been observed in the large efficacy trial of this prevention program and in recent meta-analytic reviews.
Trial registration
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Details
1 Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Southern of Minas Gerais, Barbacena, Brazil
2 Oregon Research Institute, Eugene, USA (GRID:grid.280332.8) (ISNI:0000 0001 2110 136X)
3 Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil (GRID:grid.411198.4) (ISNI:0000 0001 2170 9332)