The research suggests that since 2008, there has been "an empirically observable rise in young men sharing images of their worked-out bodies on social media platforms."
Because social media was still relatively new -- and image sharing barely a thing, back then?
He also interviewed a handful of young gym-going subjects and scoured the use of fitness-related hashtags on popular social media site Instagram, finding that a "large [proportion] of these are images of men displaying their muscular bodies."
That sounds really rigorous. Where can I get a job doing "research" like this?
This is actually pretty rigorous for the social sciences. When I was an academic (I was in the School of Pharmacy) I used to see these "qualitative" studies all the time by our students collaborating with the social scientists in other departments. These studies all consisted of unstructured interviews of a half dozen people with no clear hypothesis.
The first time I was asked to mark a thesis writing up one of these studies I failed it. The other two markers both gave it an A. I was overruled and never invited to mark a similar thesis again. I at least tried to stop this rot :(
> The reason, according to study author and University of East Anglia lecturer Jamie Hakim, is an erosion of "traditional routes to success and power" typically supplied through rewarding employment.
...or smartphones got cheaper, or going to the gym became more common, or people just discovered instagram, or...
Because social media was still relatively new -- and image sharing barely a thing, back then?
He also interviewed a handful of young gym-going subjects and scoured the use of fitness-related hashtags on popular social media site Instagram, finding that a "large [proportion] of these are images of men displaying their muscular bodies."
That sounds really rigorous. Where can I get a job doing "research" like this?