Social Comparisons, Reflected Appraisals, and Mass Media: Study Notes on Melissa A. Milkie (1999)

Study Overview: Pervasive Beauty Images and Self-Concept

Melissa A. Milkie's study, "Social Comparisons, Reflected Appraisals, and Mass Media: The Impact of Pervasive Beauty Images on Black and White Girls' Self-Concepts," explores the complex relationship between media-disseminated feminine beauty ideals and the self-esteem of adolescent girls. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly ( $1999$ ), the research addresses a gap in sociological literature where quantitative studies imply "strong effects" of media on viewers, while qualitative research emphasizes the power of individuals to critically interpret or resist media messages.

Theoretical Framework and Key Principles

The study utilizes several core social psychological concepts to explain how media imagery exerts influence even among critical audiences:

Social Comparison Processes: These processes determine how individuals learn about and evaluate themselves in relation to others. While theories suggest selectivity in choosing referants (evaluating oneself against similar others), the pervasiveness of mass media can force comparisons with idealized images that act as an inescapable "group" within local cultures.
Reflected Appraisals: This refers to an individual’s beliefs about how others view them. Symbolic interactionists argue that appraisals by others affect reflected appraisals, which in turn shape the self-concept. Reflected appraisals often act as a proxy for the “generalized other” (the perceived attitudes of an entire group or society).
Third-Person Effect: This is the pervasive belief that others are more strongly affected by media portrayals than one is personally. Evidence includes perceptions that others' children are more influenced by commercials or that others in a community are more swayed by political campaigns.
The Generalized Other: Media serves as a filter for understanding the broader society. Symbols distributed through media become points of focus for the "society" one knows, and individuals take these views into account when evaluating themselves.
Symbolic Annihilation: This occurs when groups are absent from media or portrayed unrealistically, affecting the public self-definition and social power of disadvantaged groups.

Research Methodology

Milkie employed a multi-method approach combining quantitative survey data with in-depth qualitative interviews:

Quantitative Phase: A survey of $210$ female and $227$ male students in grades $9$ and $10$ .
Qualitative Phase: In-depth interviews with a subsample of $N = 60$ girls ( $49$ white and $11$ minority: $10$ African-American and one Asian-American). Two-thirds were interviewed individually, and the rest in groups of two or three friends.
Sampling Locations:
- Urban High School: An ethnically diverse school with $1,690$ students ( $74\%$ white, $22\%$ African-American, $4\%$ other). Participation rate was $70\%$ for grade $9$ students.
- Rural High School: An all-white rural school with $314$ students ( $99\%$ white). Participation rate was $81\%$ for grade $9$ and $10$ students. Collective population of the district towns was fewer than $6,000$ people.
Measures: Quantitative measures used the Rosenberg ( $1986$ ) $10$ -item self-esteem scale and a $5$ -point Likert scale for satisfaction with appearance. Qualitative questions addressed interests, school life, magazine interpretations, perceived peer interpretations, and the desire to emulate models.

Interpretations and Criticisms of Media Images

White Girls: Media as a Role Model for the Reference Group

White girls viewed mainstream magazines like Seventeen and 'Teen as providing role models and information pertinent to their identity formation. They interpreted content as advice on how to conform to the "norm" of adolescent femininity.
Magazine reading was a significant collective activity. In the rural school, cliques discussed content over the phone and read together in hallways, lunchrooms, and libraries. In the urban context, white girls subscribed at a higher rate ( $64\%$ vs $50\%, p < .10$ ) but discussed them less frequently in public.

Black Girls: Identification and Irrelevance

African-American respondents largely saw mainstream girls' magazines as being for white girls. Only $11\%$ of black girls "always" read them, compared to more than half of white girls.
They preferred publications like Ebony, Essence, music-oriented magazines, and hairstyle publications. Tanya, an urban black girl, remarked: "You really wouldn't see too many black people in here—so if this is all you saw, you'd be kinda scared when you saw one like me."

Shared Criticisms of Realism

Regardless of ethnicity, the majority of respondents critiqued media images as artificial and unrealistic:

Sandra (Rural White): "They mainly focus on models… they make them look perfect, which nobody is. Makes everyone's expectations really high… they don't need it."
Barb (Urban Asian): Noted that even girls categorized as having "problem bodies" (e.g., in articles like "Four Weeks to a Better Body") do not actually have the flaws described, such as big hips or a big stomach: "They say if you got a stick figure, wear a one-piece… and I'm looking at the girl and she doesn't have a stick figure."
Artificiality: Images were described as "fake," involving colored contacts, thick makeup, and starvation. Over one-third of respondents explicitly stated magazines should feature "normal" or "real" girls.

Social Comparison and Self-Evaluation Findings

Emulation and Deprivation

White girls felt a strong desire to look like the "perfect" girls in magazines to gain rewards like male attention and the "perfect life." This creates "relative deprivation" because they cannot attain the media-generated ideal.
Quantitative data revealed that white girls felt significantly worse about themselves compared to media images ( $mean = 3.02$ on a $4$ -point scale, where $4 = \text{most negative}$ ) than minority girls ( $mean = 2.34, p < .001$ ).
Alana, a tall slim girl, noted: “The thing with being skinny — you think sometimes 'Maybe I should be skinny too.'”

Ethnic Buffering and Subcultural Norms

Black girls did not emulate the images and felt less pressure to conform to the thin white beauty ideal. Most considered themselves better-looking and were more satisfied with their appearance than white girls.
Eliza observed: “More of my white friends than my black friends are into [dieting]… I don't know how anybody can be like that.”
Nadia highlighted different subcultural standards: "Black men don't like skinny people that much… they'd rather have a thick person… We don't think skinny is pretty."

Perceived Importance to Others (Reflected Appraisals)

Table 1 in the study details how girls perceive the importance of these magazines for different levels of "others" on a scale of $1$ (not at all important) to $5$ (very important):

Group	Self	Best Girlfriends	Girls in School	Girls in U.S.
All Girls ( $N = 210$ )	$2.50$	$2.67$	$3.00$	$3.32$
Rural White Girls	$2.67$	$3.14$	$3.29$	$3.48$
Urban White Girls	$2.53$	$2.60$	$2.94$	$3.24$
Urban Minority Girls	$2.06$	$1.97$	$2.67$	$3.28$

All group differences (self vs. best friends, etc.) are significant at $p < .05$ .

The Impact of Male Evaluation

White girls believed boys evaluated them based on the standards of supermodels like Cindy Crawford.

Alison (Rural White): “Guys mostly look at… supermodels, an' then they look at you, an' balance the scales.”
Andrea (Urban White): “They see them and they try to compare all of us to them.”
Fat Talk: White girls reported friends who were objectively thin frequently complained they were "fat" due to these shifted norms.

Conclusion and Implications

The Inefficacy of Criticism: For white girls, being critical of media (recognizing it as unrealistic) was insufficient to prevent harm to self-esteem because they believed significant others (peers and boys) did value the images and used them for evaluation.
The Power of the Generalized Other: Media content shifts the local social standards of body shape and beauty, making "normal" girls feel abnormal.
Policy and Media Reform: Milkie suggests that school policies teaching media literacy are helpful but incomplete if they don't address the social validation of those images. She advocates for mainstream media to include a wider range of body shapes to prevent the deflation of girls' self-evaluations.
Future Directions: Qualitative research is essential to capture the complexity of how individuals understand media symbols as part of their collective social worlds rather than just individual reception.