Sociological Research on Obesity and Weight Gain Recent.pptVIP

In thinking about structural contributors to obesity. I’m going to consider four: individual socioeconomic status, neighborhood socioeconomic status, neighborhood racial composition, and exposure to racial discrimination. If we run correlations between these factors and the sample as a whole, we get no evidence of association. There is some evidence of a non-linear association between individual class status and BMI, over time. FACHS respondents who were in the most affluent class group – these are children of professionals whose parents made more than $70,000 per year had a significantly lower BMI when compared to children of working class parents. Similarly, with respect to neighborhood advantage, we found little evidence of correlations between body size and either neighborhood socioeconomic status or neighborhood racial composition except at the margins. However, we do see a relatively strong linkage between social location and body size is in its influence on weight. * * When we originally started this analysis, we examined base correlations between potential structural contributors to overweight and BMI. Initially we got no significant correlations which was surprising given the extensive literature demonstrating this relationship. We finally realize that about a third of the respondents in this fourth wave, who are between age 17 and 20 had moved within the previous 12 months and thus it wouldn’t necessarily have been reasonable to expect to see any relationships. So, we isolated the sample to those who had been living in the same home for at least the previous year and started to see some correlations. What I’m going to show you today is data from that more truncated sample. The sample we’re working with right now has some limited business related data, in particular counts of convenience stores and bars are available and are clean enough to be considered valid. We’re working on obtaining funding to create similar counts for grocery stores, re