Advisory Committee Chair
Janet Bronstein
Advisory Committee Members
Olivia Affuso
David J Becker
Julie L Locher
Andrew C Rucks
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
2015
Degree Name by School
Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) School of Public Health
Abstract
INDIVIDUAL, FAMILY, AND SOCIAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH ADOLESCENT OBESITY: A POLICY RELEVANT FOCUS JANICE M. UTLEY PUBLIC HEALTH ABSTRACT This dissertation is comprised of three papers that examined individual, family, and social factors associated with adolescent overweight and obesity with the aim of generating data that could inform the design of policy interventions to prevent or reverse rising prevalence. The first investigation was a type of literature review called a scoping study that examined the extent, range, and type of research activity on adolescent obesity that used a multilevel or hierarchical design to look at two or more contextual areas of influence to learn about study characteristics and usage, and to summarize the key findings of these investigations. The second study in this dissertation had three research aims. The first was to use a framework that conceptually integrated the Socioecological Perspective and Positive Youth Development models to examine whether selected neighborhood, family, and individual factors were associated with the probability of an adolescent being overweight/obese. The second aim was to investigate whether the effects of these predictors changed as groups of neighborhood, family, and individual factors were sequentially added to a multivariate model. The third aim was to discover whether differences existed between the effects of the predictors for the 10-13 and 14-17 year old age groups. The third study in this dissertation had four research questions. The first examined whether exposures to a variety of individual, family, and neighborhood factors varied across low, medium, and high income levels for the adolescent participants in this analysis. The second investigated the associations between a model of selected iii individual, family, and neighborhood factors and the probability of an adolescent being classified as overweight/obese. The third aim was to examine whether the risk differences of each significant predictor in this model varied when the results were stratified by low, medium, and high levels of household income. Parceling out the risk differences of the determinants by level of income could allow policy-makers to create interventions uniquely targeted to specific subpopulations, including those that are the most at risk. The fourth study aim was to examine whether disparities existed between the risk differences of the predictors for the 10-13 and 14-17 year old groups.
Recommended Citation
Utley, Janice Marguerite, "Individual, Family, And Social Factors Associated With Adolescent Obesity: A Policy Relevant Focus" (2015). All ETDs from UAB. 3196.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/3196