Development and Validation of Make-up and Sexualized Clothing Questionnaires

Today's society increasingly sexualizes women (Kilbourne, 2003). Women are constantly confronted with an image of beauty through various forms of media. Body acceptance programs on college campuses have found that women often report feeling pressure to dress in a sexualized manner, cover up their so-called flaws with make-up, and continually strive to be thin. Currently, no measure exists to assess the daily behaviors of women to wear make-up or dress in certain ways due to body image concerns. Thus, the goal of the current studies was to develop a brief self-report questionnaire on make-up and sexualized clothing for college women. In Study 1, items were developed from qualitative data collected by the Body Project Prevention Program to assess pressure to wear make-up, discomfort when not wearing make-up, pressure to wear sexualized clothing, and body image concerns with regards to sexualized clothing. Exploratory factor analyses revealed a Confidence and a Comfort subscale for the Make-up Questionnaire (MUQ) and a Body Dissatisfaction and Pressure subscale for the Sexualized Clothing Questionnaire (SCQ). Confirmatory factor analyses in Study 2 confirmed the factor structure for the MUQ and SCQ. Study 3 compared scores on the MUQ and SCQ among intervention and control groups across time points. A gain score analysis revealed that women in the intervention did not become significantly healthier over time in comparison to the control group on the MUQ and SCQ subscales. However, the treatment condition did become significantly healthier over time in regard to other measures of eating pathology. These studies provide insight into the pressures women feel to wear make-up and sexualized clothing.