Looking at “Ethnic/racial differences in weight-related concerns and behaviors among adolescent girls and boys Findings from Project EAT” published by Dianne Neumark-Sztainer*, Jillian Croll, Mary Story, Peter J. Hannan, Simone A. French, Cheryl Perry, from Journal of Psychosomatic Research 53 (2002)963-974.
The paper compared weight-related concerns and behaviors across ethnicity/race among a population-based adolescent boys and girls sample.
According to information from the ‘method’ section of the research paper, it’s worth noting that there are two concerns when using the sample as representative for the larger population. The overall study sample consists of 4746 adolescents from 31 public middle and high schools in urban and suburban school districts in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area of Minnesota. From these introductions, we’ve noticed that the area where the sample was taken was restricted to a single state. In the US, cultures between different coasts and states appear to be separated; for example, the culture of New York is very different compared to the culture of California, and indeed, they are all different from Minnesota, which is on the Middle North Coast. So, it is concerning whether data collected from only one state of the US could represent the whole country and the whole ethnicity.
Secondly, it’s also worth noticing that the sample was only taken from public middle and high schools. However, there are not only public schools but also private schools and home schools as modes of education across the country. They are all valuable ways and popular choices for adolescents to obtain education, and the situation where there’s a proportion of children who didn’t get educated should also be considered. While the education adolescents receive is different, their interaction with peers and the beliefs they might form also varies. A sample taken from public schools can represent adolescents who attended public middle school, though it is doubtful whether it can represent the whole US adolescent population.
However, the paper present high social and scientific value for society.
Firstly, the author stated that understanding the similarities and differences in weight-related concerns and behaviors among different ethnic groups may provide insight into sociocultural influences on these concerns or behaviors. As a result, the experiment showed that the differences are striking and suggested that there are ethnic-specific social norms within groups. For example, prevention interventions and healthy weight control strategies need to be promoted, especially among African American girls; the research gives a hint of possible reasons why chronic diseases that are associated with obesity are high, especially in Native American girls; Asian American girls show the trend of more conforming to dominant social norms. There are also great similarities, such as girls from different ethnicities all tend to have weight-related concerns, and a big proportion of them had engaged in unhealthy weight control behaviors. These findings demonstrated the pervasiveness of weight-related social norms within our society.
The experiment controlled other variables that may be associated with both ethnicity and BMI to ascertain better which weight-related concerns and behaviors might be attributed to ethnicity. This information is also important in better understanding etiological processes. The current result shows that the associations between ethnicity and overweight status are statistically significant, indicating that ethnic differences in obesity are not only a function of socioeconomic differences between persons from different ethnicities, and pointed out that it is worth studying whether ethnic differences in overweight status are primarily due to genetic differences or social norm differences
As a brief conclusion shown from the data results, looking at girls from different cultures, disordered eating behaviors were taken the most by Hispanic girls and least by other/mixed race girls, taken most by Asian American boys and least by white boys, and notably, the risk of non-white individuals having disordered eating is higher than white individuals and the trend is increasing. Though it’s still unclear whether these differences were due to social norms or genetic reasons, this research raised awareness of these issues; it pointed out the value of further research on related topics while discovering the pattern that can prevent eating disorders effectively crossing all ethnicities.
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