Graeme Ditchburn

In assessing and attempting to modify attitudes toward fatness, academics and researchers make use of measures and scales developed specifically for this purpose. Currently the more robust and recommended instruments focus on measuring anti-fat sentiment. While it may seem logical that to reduce anti-fat attitudes we need explicit anti-fat measures, this approach is not without consequence and deserves thoughtful critique. In this chapter, key measures of anti-fat attitudes are reviewed in order to draw attention to the problematic ways in which fatness, fat bodies and fat people are depicted. Examination of these measures indicates that assessments of fat people’s character and attractiveness are central to the current operationalizations of anti-fat attitudes, with the spectrum of negative appraisals including: being deviant, inferior, impaired and disgusting. Intervention research that attempts to engender more positive attitudes is also examined and found to frequently espouse negativity. Research participants are commonly engaged with stereotypically negative messages and deleterious images of fatness and fat people and then required to complete anti-fat measures. Even research approaching from a critical fat agenda, due to a lack of alternatives, paradoxically relies on anti-fat instruments for assessing positive change. Reflecting on this approach to measurement and intervention is vital if we are to continue to do work within this research protocol, and if we are to develop measures and materials that honor all bodies and reflect the colorful and complex landscape of fat discourse.

As public discourse has increasingly entrenched a view fatness as a major cause of disease burden in western countries, so too has stigmatization of fat people become an endemic feature of cultural, social, and psychic life. One of the main goals of fat acceptance movements is to remove this stigma, and a considerable body of research in social psychology and related fields has developed around creating and testing the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce weight stigma. In reviewing the extant body of work around weight stigma reduction, we are less interested in the outcomes or effectiveness of particular approaches; instead, we turn a critical lens on the types of interventions carried out and the materials and the messages presented to participants as part of these interventions. Although weight stigma reduction interventions are clearly motivated by a desire to reduce animosity and improve the lives of fat people, we worry that elements of their design may have the paradoxical effect of perpetuating and legitimizing some aspects of the negative stereotypes of fat people. In this chapter, we will review the typical forms of stigma reduction interventions with a critical eye towards the issues that researchers need to consider in designing interventions that embody the values of critical fat scholarship.