Body Image and Methods

I am currently working on an image event for my women's studies class in which we are to raise awareness about an issue we've studied in a visually-dominate manner. Our group's idea is to send people to a facebook group (not yet created) that will compare body images of men to women, showing the societal disparity. Before we begin our work on the actual creation of our image(s) we must write a proposal with research on research methods. I was wondering if you would be able to supply any info regarding facebook?

So I don't feel like I have enough information about your project to be helpful. Facebook groups can be a great place to bring people together to share ideas and discuss concepts on forums, they have the advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of people owning pre-existing accounts that pretty accurately and comprehensively represent their identities. I imagine this project could go in many ways - your research methods should best match your research questions and individual competencies as researchers.

For instance you might do qualitative content analysis (discourse analysis) on the discussions and reactions people have with regards to different pictures. What do people say about them? Does this relate to aspects of their identity (gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity)? How does language choice shape the way people think and talk about body image? Does the discourse only happen in some forms, or does it privilege or disempower some participants? Who's not even involved in the discourse, and does that matter? Is there a history to these relationships or conceptions? This sort of approach would better match people well-versed in literary critical analysis.

Or you might instead post some pictures in the group, ask a bunch of people to look at them, and then conduct interviews or a survey after. Interviews could help to discern how people make sense of the pictures - what their impressions where, what they meant to them or how they spoke. A survey would be more suited to gathering general perspectives, but would constrain their responses to whatever questions and answers the survey designers choose, which could make data uniform and easy to analyze, but also incomplete or reduce its validity.

I think most importantly you should give some thought to picking key research questions. From there you can decide if you want to go about your work inductively (observing what's going on and looking for themes) or deductively (starting with a theory and testing it). Mixing these two methods might be possible, but could be very difficult (and ill-advised) within the same study for a number of reasons.