#postpartumbody – How are postpartum women depicted on Insta?
Women who have recently given birth (postpartum) are often more open to adopting new healthy behaviours, and in doing so they can better support their future health, and that of their child. However, lifestyle changes and the pressures of parenting can make targeting them with healthy lifestyle messaging a challenge.
A recent study supervised by researchers at Monash’s Health and Social Care Unit has used Instagram to better understand women’s exposure to postpartum body images, and begin to consider its utility as a public health messaging platform to target this group. With 39 per cent of Instagram’s one billion active monthly users being women of reproductive age, the platform can provide fascinating insights and offers great potential.
With the Monash contribution led by Dr Heidi Bergmeier, the researchers aimed to systematically describe the content of relevant images uploaded to Instagram that women in the postpartum period are likely to consume, and drill down to find differences between ‘recent’ images and ‘top’ images – those promoted by the platform as trending or popular. The researchers hypothesised that the majority of women in images would depict a thin and/or muscular body shape.
After some initial exploration of hashtags, the researchers chose to focus on images tagged with #postpartumbody. They chose a randomly selected window of time – one Sunday afternoon and into the next morning in October 2020 – and used the Instagram account of a 31 year old Australian female to identify 600 images for analysis.
Of the 600 images, 300 were captured from the ‘Recent’ posts category, indicating images most recently uploaded to Instagram by users tagged with #postpartumbody and 300 from the ‘Top’ posts category, indicating posts that are ‘trending’ or ‘popular’ with highest recent engagement.
These were coded according a framework used in a previous relevant study. The first layer of coding related to image content category – e.g. food, non-pregnant woman, woman and child, cartoon, text-based image, etc. These were broken down further. For instance, food-based images were coded for high nutritional value or high-energy; photos featuring women were coded for adiposity (degree of visible body fat), muscularity, and style of pose (sexual pose, fitness pose, body part accentuation); text-based images were coded for positivity and negativity of message, as well as the topic (exercise, food, appearance, commercial products etc).
They found that women in images generally had low or average levels of adiposity, and little-to-none or some visible muscle definition. Images in the ‘Top’ category tended to feature more women, and fewer text-based images, food or links to products or services, suggesting that those ‘information’ style posts are less popular with this cohort.
Despite the hashtag being #postpartumbody, only five per cent of images focused on features
commonly associated with a postpartum body, including stretch marks, stomach, cellulite, sagging breasts or caesarean scars. Furthermore, of images able to be coded for adiposity, only nine per cent were coded as being a woman with a ‘high’ level of adiposity, 37 per cent coded as having ‘low’ and 54 per cent coded as having ‘average’ adiposity.
“This is really interesting as pregnancy is often contextualised as something to be recovered from, much like an illness,” says Dr Bergmeier. “Given the global trend we’re seeing of too much weight gain during pregnancy, the bodies these women are exposed to on Instagram don’t seem representative of real life for many.”
Approximately a third of photos of women featured poses that were described as objectifying – either sexualised, or focussed on the level of fitness. Of those – and even of the remaining two thirds – many will have been carefully selected prior to upload, and potentially digitally enhanced.
“Women who view and compare themselves to such idealized imagery may be more likely to experience feelings of inadequacy and body dissatisfaction, particularly postpartum women who have recently undergone dramatic body changes during and following pregnancy,” says Dr Bergmeier. “The lack of curvaceous women who are often representative of this life stage suggests a body-positive movement is yet to take hold in this corner of social media.”
So is Instagram a potential avenue to influence the health behaviours and body-image of postpartum women?
“That’s still very much up for debate,” says Dr Bergmeier. “The pandemic has shown an uptick in women turning to social media generally, but conversely research indicates they often prefer personalised health information from people they know and respect. However, a movement that encouraged more body-positivity could also normalise some pregnancy-related changes, and that might reduce anxiety associated with self-perception.
“Definitely a case of ‘more research needed!’”
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