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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Minnesota State University, Mankato
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Moved To Move: Socially Contextualizing Women's Exercise Motivations, Dusti Rae Werner
Moved To Move: Socially Contextualizing Women's Exercise Motivations, Dusti Rae Werner
All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects
Using qualitative data from 11 interviews with women who exercise regularly, this research explores women's motivations to exercise, how they make social comparisons and how they self-evaluate their bodies through the social context of gender, socio-economic status and race. Women with intrinsic motivations to exercise find more positive, long term outcomes than those with extrinsic motivations. Women compare themselves to similar others, such as their peers to form self-evaluations more readily than they do media images. Respondents also indicated the importance of relationships in beginning and maintaining exercise regimes.