The Definition of Beauty
Video research focus on examining international students' changes in perceptions of beauty
CONTEXT
We define everyday as “a vernacular expression performed by individuals and passed informally between people.” The Asian international culture within the United States is vernacular in comparison to the dominant White-American culture as well as the prevalent Asian-American culture. Our goal was to reveal to a broader public how this omitted population adapted to a substantially different culture regarding beauty on personal levels. In other words, we were interested in examining and documenting how our subjects vernacularly respond to the cultural clash between two institutions (East Asian culture and American culture). Through this project we focused on international students’ changes in perceptions of beauty and their beauty daily routines. In addition, we did observations in groups, which also involves everyday communication element inside the culture group.
ROLE
Researcher. Video editor.
DURATION
2 months (2017.03 - 05)
TEAM
Yuhui Xie, Tammy L. Park, Yixuan Zhong
Focus Group
We specifically focused on those who consider themselves as female, East Asian, and are international students enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We were focusing on females because we believed that females typically pay more attention to appearances than males do. By “East Asia” we were referring to students who originate from the following countries/regions: China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Mongolia, South and North Korea, and Japan. And by “international students” we were specifically referring to those who are non-U.S. citizens, and have only been living in the states for any time between 2 to 6 years.
South Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan are some of the top 10 leading countries in plastic surgery, and many people from these countries get such surgeries to appear more Caucasian (CNN, “Asia’s Ideal Beauty: Looking Caucasian,” 2013). The culture group that we have chosen was particularly relevant to this question, because East Asian international students’ special multicultural experience may have greatly altered their ideologies regarding beauty. Their diverse backgrounds and unique cultural experiences allowed them to best reflect on our questions about perceptions of beauty standards.
Research Method 1
We conducted 30 minutes in-depth interview with 12 interviewee. Questions like "what's the standard of asian beauty" "have you ever considered doing plastic surgery" "what surprised you the most in terms of dressing style, makeup style or life-style after coming to the U.S." and "how did your standard of beauty changed after studying in the U.S. for over a year" were asked during interview.
One example of metadata form collected from an interviewee
Research Method 2
We recorded and organized an activity in which we prepared 6 photos of female celebrities and asked 5 participants to both rank these photos based on their “beauty level”, and to provide reasons behind their decisions.
Left: photo of participants. Right: result of ranking the celebrities.
Final result
At the end, by looking through all the footages and data we collected, we decided on structuring the video in the following way.
