Hello blog readers, this is Bonnie. I would like to share a little bit about the first official meeting we had in preparation for our amazing journey!! Mary Delgado, who takes care of the international students here on campus and arranged this meeting, was very nice, and so extremely excited for us and this trip. We covered a lot of ground during our time together. First we all went around and introduced ourselves, and talked briefly about our majors and interests, as well as how the idea of applying for the Jordan grant came about. There were two international grad students present, Rasha and Amani, who are close to my age and were also excited to bond with us and tell us all about their home. We watched a great tourism video, and we were invited to attend an Arabic class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The video was a great experience, because all four of the Jordanians present piped in with stories and ideas about which things we definitely should see, and which places were close to their homes..We four pretty much just listened for the duration of the meeting while the four from Jordan talked excitedly about home. We learned about the food (the women want to cook for us in their dorms as soon as finals are over), what to wear, the weather and the landscape (we learned that there is snow in Jordan, and it isn't as hot and dry as one might think), about the history and different sites to visit (some trips are being planned for us- so cool), and about how wonderful and welcoming the people will be there to us and to feel comfortable asking any of the locals any questions that we might have while we are there. It is very safe, and people leave their doors unlocked all the time- the surrounding countries love Jordan for its safety. There are also shopping malls and a wide variety of restaurants. Everyone at the meeting wants us to meet their familes while we are there, and we are welcome in their homes as guests as well. We talked about what our surveys entailed (as far as women bringing them home to mothers, the length of the surveys, and translating)..the women seemed to think that this would be very easy to do. Mary would like an idea of when the questionnaires would be ready to translate, as they may hire some of the students to work on the translation. I let her know that we needed them all together for the IRB which we are working hard on completing right now. Some random things... as women we should never put out our hands to shake a man's hand. To say hello we can just wave and smile, and just say hello. As far as clothing, we can pretty much wear whatever we like, as there are many tourists from countries such as Europe and China all the time- bathing suits will be fine and we can show our hair. They said that we absolutely must try certain foods, and ride camels. We all exchanged emails and numbers to get together and talk as soon as possible- and we were invited to go with them on a campus trip to visit the state house and Quincy market on Friday afternoon. I asked them if they knew of any good Middle Eastern restaurants that they really liked and felt like home, and they had some favorites- so we are making plans to go out and eat together (all of us women) and then shop for good Jordanian attire. It is all very very exciting. Mary is eager for us to bond so that we feel very connected with the culture before we go. I am personally very excited to befriend them and to learn as much about them (and the language!) as I can =) What else... here is the link to the video that we watched : http://na.visitjordan.com/I know I could come up with so much more.. Our next meeting is on May 5th!! We will keep you posted on updates!

The Questionnaire.

Hello everyone, this is Ashley. We are very busy getting ready for our trip to Jordan. We have put together our research survey, which is in the process of being reviewed. So far it looks like we will need to make some edits before the president of Tafila Tech. University will accept the questions we want to ask his students. I think that most of the edits will have to be made to the demographic questions we wanted to ask (sexual orientation, etc.), because Jordan is more conservative than we are in America. We definitely do not want to offend anyone.

Once the questionnaire is finalized, we still need to have it translated from English to Arabic.

What will be included in our Questionnaire:

• The Multidimensional Body-Self Relations Questionnaire-Apperance Scales (MBSRQ-AS), which uses self report data to measure different asspects of body image.

• The Figure Rating Scale (FRS), which uses the difference between an individual's actual body size and thier desired body size to measure body image disturbance.

• Demographic information, questions about religious practice, and health behaviors

• The Eating Attitudes Test, which assesses eating behaviors.
  

• The Fagerstrom Test of Nicotine Dependence, which assesses smoking behavior
  

• Media exposure questions

We're going to Jordan!

This is Heidi Woofenden and this is our first blog post. We're all super excited to go to Jordan to do research this July. We'll be going the 6th to the 27th to collect research on body image from Tafila Technical University (TTU) and hopefully Yarmouk University and Amman University. I'm focusing on religiosity's effect on body image, Kaitlyn Baptista will be focusing on media exposure's effect on body image, Bonnie Fletcher will be focusing on the effects of health behaviors on body image, and Ashley DeMello will be making cross-cultural comparisons of Jordanian and American body images overall and in all of these specific areas, and focusing specifically on the differences between the young men and women in both cultures.

We've been doing much prep work over the past months. We're currently in the process of putting together an Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal to get our research approved. We've already gotten the funding for the research from the school but now we must submit a proposal to our IRB and those of the two Jordanian universities to make sure our research is justified, ethical, etc. This is quite a project! Of course we're also trying to learn as much as possible about Jordanian culture so as to be able to assimilate ourselves as best we can. We've met with several Jordanian graduate students currently studying at BSC and are planning more meetings and outings with them for the coming months before we depart. They couldn't be more friendly and helpful. I've also been talking to a current TTU student on Facebook and he's shed light on a lot of questions and concerns I have. We've been doing lots of independent research as well and sharing whatever we find with the group. We're very excited but also apprehensive because we don't quite know what to expect from a country so different from our own. We'll find out soon enough!