Following our predictions, we find closeness and contact
frequency are clearly associated with women’s perceptions of
negative judgment by others and in similar ways. The women’s
level of felt stigma (i.e., self stigma) is sensitive to the opinions of
subjectively close alters and frequent associates, but not non-close
others and infrequent associates. Moreover, targets tend to think
family members say they need to lose weight more than do nonfamily
members. However, family members are actually no more
judgmental than non-family members. It is important to note that
these associations are significant, but only explain about 3% of the
variance in individual’s own views after taking into account
women’s own body size. Body size (BMI) in itself did explain the
largest part of variation in our models (28%), but this still leaves
much additional variation unexplained. It is also important to note
that gender of an alter does not significantly modify women’s
ability to perceive their opinions. And alters who are similar to the
target in body size do not have greater influence than those alters
who are dissimilar to the target.