Original articleWatching reality television beauty shows is associated with tanning lamp use and outdoor tanning among college students
Section snippets
Participants
We approached 642 college students at an inner-city college in Brooklyn, NY, to complete the survey. Of those approached, 22 refused to complete the survey and 15 invalid surveys were returned. The response rate of 94.2% was computed from the 605 surveys that were completed correctly [(605/642) * 100%]. To allow for a more consistent young adult sample, we excluded from the analyses 23 individuals older than 35 years and 4 individuals who did not provide age data. We also excluded 2 individuals
Results
Table I shows the characteristics for the variables. The mean age of the participants was almost 23 years. There was an approximately equal percent of men and women. More than half of the sample was of non-white race/ethnicity. Each of the parasocial subscales on the Audience-Persona Interaction Scale and the Motive Social Learning Scale had average scores indicating disagree. The Perceived Realism Scale had an average score indicating rarely. The Facebook Scale had an average score indicating
Discussion
This study found that those who did versus did not watch reality TV beauty shows used tanning lamps and tanned outdoors at significantly greater percentages. These results remained constant even after adjusting for relevant covariates. Also, with regard to tanning lamp use, increasing age and female sex were significantly associated with greater odds whereas Hispanic, Asian, or other race/ethnicity were each significantly associated with lesser odds. With regard to outdoor tanning, black,
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Funding sources: None.
Conflicts of interest: None declared.