ORIGINAL PAPER
Polish normalization of the Body Esteem Scale
 
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Submission date: 2014-02-05
 
 
Acceptance date: 2014-02-06
 
 
Online publication date: 2014-02-04
 
 
Publication date: 2014-01-31
 
 
Health Psychology Report 2013;1(1):72-81
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Background
Physical attractiveness plays an important part in one’s social functioning. The interest in one’s own appearance have been documented as widespread among the female population, but over the recent years it is more and more often emphasized that concentrating on body appearance concerns men as well. Franzoi and Shields (1984) created the Body Esteem Scale which allows to qualify the subject’s attitude towards his or her own body.
The aim of the study was to create a Polish version of the Body Esteem Scale along with the norms for age and sex clusters.

Participants and procedure
The normalization sample consisted of 4298 participants: 1865 women aged 16 to 80 (M = 29.92; SD = 12.85) and 2433 men aged 16 to 78 (M = 28.74; SD = 11.50). Education levels among the participants were also controlled for.
In order to create a Polish version of the Body Esteem Scale, translation was adopted as the adaptation strategy. Like the original one, the Polish scale comprises 35 items grouped into three gender specific subscales. The subscales for women include Sexual Attractiveness, Weight Concern, and Physical Condition, whereas the body esteem of is examined with regards to Physical Attractiveness, Upper Body Strength, and Physical Condition.

Results
Reliability of subscales was high both for females (Cronbach’s alpha from 0.80 to 0.89) and males (Cronbach’s alpha from 0.85 to 0.88).
The given coefficients of reliability cover the original division into subscales adopted by the authors of BES.

Conclusions
We confirmed high reliability of the Polish version of the Body Esteem Scale, thus we recommend it as a diagnostic tool. Created norms allowed to refer results obtained in the course of research carried out on people with various disorders (e.g. eating disorders or body dysmorphic disorder) with population data for corresponding age brackets.
 
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