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It's Just Gym_McClure3.pdf (8.93 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

"It's Just Gym": Physicality and Identity among African American Adolescent Girls

McClure, Stephanie M
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1365183024

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Anthropology.
It’s Just Gym presents the findings of a study that explored how a group of African American adolescent girls attending a suburban, middle-class high school in the Midwest experience and enact their physicality in school settings. This study was devised as an attempt to critically examine how local cultural context informs the disproportionately high levels of obesity and the disproportionately low levels of physical activity documented among African American females beginning at puberty. The study aims were to (1) question the lay and scientific conventional wisdom regarding body size and health promotion among African American females and (2) present an alternate framework for exploring the institutional and social contexts in which the study participants expressed that physicality. In this mixed methods exploration that included surveys, focus groups, interviews, observation, electronic activity monitoring, anthropometry and personal network assessment, school-based physical education and extra-curricular activities, gender, race and class emerged as key, intersecting contexts of physicality. Relational strategies – including personal network composition and the circumstances of resort to separation – were explored, as were the participants’ experiences of recreational and functional exertion. Emerging from these explorations is a set of accounts of body conceptualization and physical activity engagement among the participants that are characterized by patterns of similarity and difference. These patterns reflect the dynamic operation of intersecting contexts, individual experience and relationship dynamics in these young women’s identities. That is, these patterns indicate that body conceptualizations and activity predilections among the participants were the outcomes of a complex, yet not wholly individualized, set of influences, circumstances, perceptions and behaviors that are not readily predicted by any one category of identity. Thus, in addition to being a unique case study, the process by which these findings were obtained presents a model for investigation, analysis and understanding of local contexts of physicality-informed identity across localities and populations.
Eileen Anderson-Fye, EdD (Committee Chair)
Atwood Gaines, PhD, MPH (Committee Member)
Janet McGrath, PhD (Committee Member)
Jonathan Sadowsky, PhD (Committee Member)
383 p.
African Americans; Behaviorial Sciences; Cultural Anthropology; Gender; Health Education; Public Health
identity; physicality; physical activity; body image; embodiment; African American females; adolescent; high school

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • McClure, S. M. (2013). "It's Just Gym": Physicality and Identity among African American Adolescent Girls [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1365183024

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • McClure, Stephanie. "It's Just Gym": Physicality and Identity among African American Adolescent Girls. 2013. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1365183024.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • McClure, Stephanie. ""It's Just Gym": Physicality and Identity among African American Adolescent Girls." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1365183024

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1365183024
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© 2013, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.