Developing a justice-focused body image program for U.S. middle schoolers: a school-based community-engaged research process

We describe a community-engaged research process to co-create and implement an evidence-informed, diversity-focused body image program for early adolescents. Our team included middle school staff, students, and teachers, and university faculty and students. Team members had a diverse range of intersecting cis- and transgender, racial, sexuality, and disability identities. Specific steps to the research process included: (1) establishing team leads at each site to maintain a collaborative and non-hierarchical team structure; (2) bi-weekly advisory team meetings to establish program needs and discuss curriculum and implementation options; (3) a year-long youth co-design process to generate content ideas, pilot pieces of programming, and incorporate youth leadership through an equity lens; (4) inclusive program writing from members of socially marginalized groups; (5) program piloting to solicit feedback from teachers, facilitators, and students; and (6) collaboratively incorporating feedback. The resulting 8-session (6 hours total) Body Justice Project has both dissonance-based and media literacy foundations, with topics related to cultural appearance ideals, diet culture and non-diet nutrition, media and appearance pressure, and body autonomy. It is designed for in-class delivery to middle school students by trained college and youth co-facilitator teams. We emphasize guiding principles and lessons learned, along with next steps in implementation.