Strengths and Limitations
eating disorders
A strength of this study was its generalisability; a mixed-age, community sample of men and women was used, which is not common in evaluating social marketing or anti-stigma campaigns for body image and eating disorders [Further limitations were that engagement was examined at one point in time, which precluded examination of change in engagement resulting from video viewing, and that the use for the cover story likely did not fully conceal the purpose of the study. In addition, the standalone persuasive appeal video was rated as less visually appealing and with lower production quality than the other videos, which may have impacted interest and attention to the videos. Another limitation is the varying length of the videos, in particular the difference in viewing time between the persuasive appeal only video, and the conditions to which the persuasive appeal video was added. As such, the effects of video length from video content may be difficult to separate. Although all videos were short in duration, future research should consider using equivalent length videos in all conditions. An additional limitation is around cultural relevance; although we collected country of residence, we did not collect information on other demographic characteristics; which may be of relevance considering academics and actors appearing in the videos were white. Future research examining engagement in such videos may wish to collect information such as cultural background, to better assess generalisability of the research, and aim to ensure the cast is not all or majority white to better reflect a community sample’s characteristics. Finally, a limitation is that most people in the video were thin; this may have unintentionally reinforced the idea that body dissatisfaction is only a problem when the person’s body is smaller; further research should examine the impact and potential benefits of educating the public that body dissatisfaction has a negative impact at all sizes, the issue of weight stigma, and attempt to include more size diversity.