Effects of gender, media influences, and traditional gender role orientation on disordered eating and appearance concerns among Latino adolescents q Vera Lopez a, * , Rosalie Corona b , Raquel Halfond b, c a Justice & Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA b Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA c Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, USA Keywords: Latinos Latino/a adolescents Media Gender role Traditional gender roles Disordered eating Appearance Body image Gender differences abstract This study examined the main and interaction effects of gender, traditional gender role orientation, and media-influenced sociocultural values and ideals about appearance in a sample of 96 Latino adolescents controlling for age, country of origin, and BMI. Girls and less traditionally oriented youth reported significantly more disordered eating and appearance concerns than did boys and more traditionally oriented youth. Gender moderated the relationship between traditional gender role orientation and disordered eating and appearance concerns. Contrary to our hypothesis, media-influenced sociocultural values and ideals about appearance did not significantly predict disordered eating and appearance concerns. However, the interaction between gender and sociocultural values and ideals about appearance was significant. Our findings highlight the importance of continued research on gender, media, and cultural influences as they relate to disordered eating and appearance concerns among Latino youth. Ó 2013 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. From a young age, youth are bombarded with media images about what types of bodies are considered attractive. For some girls, thinness is featured as the ultimate mark of beauty (Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008) whereas for boys, a lean muscular physique represents the ultimate ideal (Labre, 2002; Warren, Schoen, & Schafer, 2010). Adolescents who internalize these sociocultural ideals are at heightened risk for developing eating disorders and associated problems such as body dissatis- faction (Ata, Ludden, & Lally, 2007; Grogan & Richards, 2002; Labre, 2002). The literature on disordered eating and associated health outcomes is relatively less developed for minority adolescents, particularly Latino youth. Whether associations found in other samples (e.g., media-influenced beliefs predicting disordered eating) hold true for Latino youth is less known and relatively few studies have examined how cultural factors (other than acculturation) predict disordered eating and appear- ance concerns. The current study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining how gender, media-influenced so- ciocultural values and ideals about appearance, and traditional gender role orientation relate to disordered eating and appearance concerns among Latino adolescents. q This study was funded by a grant awarded to Dr. Rosalie Corona from the VCU Institute for Women’s Health (IWH). We would like to thank Vivian Rodriguez, Lillian Stevens, and Maria Isabela Frangenberg for their assistance with back translation and Will Hartmann for help with data collection and entry. We are also grateful to Ms. Tanya Gonzalez who provided guidance regarding participant recruitment and to the adolescents who shared their experiences. * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 602 796 3999. E-mail address: vera.lopez@asu.edu (V. Lopez). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Adolescence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jado 0140-1971/$ – see front matter Ó 2013 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2013.05.005 Journal of Adolescence 36 (2013) 727–736