Reflection of parents social appearance anxiety scale on children's social appearance

Each person has an assessment of their own body and appearance. These positive or negative assessments they have about their bodies and social appearances affect their lives and shape their social relations. Each person has certain assessment criteria for their body and social appearance. Not only does a person employ these criteria for the assessment of their own body and social appearance, but they also asses the social appearance of their social circle and even strangers based on these criteria. Current research looks into how parents' social appearance anxiety scale reflects on preschoolers' social appearance and identifies related determining factors. In this study, a qualitative research method named holistic multiple case study is used and participants of this research are the parents of preschool-age kids who reside in Yüreğir province of Adana city. Deviant case sampling method was employed to determine the participants. For this purpose, "Social Appearance Anxiety Scale" which consists of 16 articles and was translated to Turkish by Doğan (2010) was applied to 100 participants. Then the collected data was analyzed via IBM SPSS 25 program and meetings were conducted with 16 parents, 8 of which had the highest score of 66 and 8 of which had the lowest score of 24. All the meetings were voice recorded, then converted to text and were subjected to content analysis. Findings consist of parents' definition of ideal body size for children, views on their children's social appearance, parents' view on reflections of children's height and weight on their social relations, children's interventions to their social appearances and their methods of intervention and lastly, children's expectations of their bodies. Consequently, parents' high or low SGKÖ scores show different results on parents' thoughts on children's social appearance, children's expectation on their bodies and parents' definition of ideal body size for children. However, children's intervention to their social appearance was unexpectedly similar to each other. These results show that the level of social appearance anxiety scale will cause differences in upbringing of their children. It is understood that if parents have a high SGKÖ score, then they tend to interfere with their children's body more.