The Experience of Embodiment Construct

Abstract

Embodiment captures a breadth of phenomena and reflects, concurrently, the lived-in experiences of inhabiting the body and the meaningful dialogical relationships between the body and the social environment. This chapter explicates the Experience of Embodiment construct, which emerged in a series of three qualitative studies with girls, younger women, and older women. This construct ranges from negative to positive embodiment and includes five dimensions: body connection and comfort, agency and functionality, experience and expression of bodily desires, attuned self-care, and subjective immersion (resisting objectification). This chapter also presents a measure of this construct, the Experience of Embodiment Scale, which is a fully structured scale that has accrued evidence of reliability and validity. This scale may contribute uniquely to the understanding of embodied lives, to etiological theories of embodied well-being and distress, and to intervention studies.