Julia Fitzpatrick '23 (currently a third year clinical psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis) recently published an article based on her St. Mary's Project in the journal Eating Behaviors along with collaborators Associate Professor of Psychology Jennifer Tickle and researchers from Stanford University. Data collection for the project ran across three semesters and also involved psychology research assistants Lorelai Symmes '25, Madeleine Carter '25 and Elaina Barbour '25 who are acknowledged in the paper.
The Body Project is an empirically supported peer-led eating disorder prevention program designed for young women which combats body dissatisfaction and thin ideal internalization. This study compared the effectiveness of the Body Project delivered in its usual in-person format compared to virtual delivery of the program. Both formats successfully reduced thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction, dietary restraint and eating disorder symptoms. There was no statistical difference between the formats in their effectiveness, but the effect sizes for virtual delivery were slightly larger and deserve further examination. These results suggest that a virtual delivery of the program could be as effective as the original in-person implementation which would allow increased accessibility to an efficacious prevention program.
