ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: To examine the role of blame as a mediator of the relationships between perceiver age and gender and children's acceptance of an overweight peer. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of children's perceptions of their overweight peers using structural equation modeling. PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred and ninety-one children between the ages of 3 and 11 years. MEASUREMENTS: Children viewed a videotape of a same-sex peer, dressed to appear overweight, interacting with an adult. After viewing the videotape, children responded to items assessing their perceptions of the child's social and emotional traits and how much the child was to blame for being overweight.Results:Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the traits loaded on a single factor, acceptance. RESULTS: of analyses for our structural equation model indicated that as blame increased, acceptance of the peer decreased. The relationships between gender and blame and gender and acceptance were not significant. Children were categorized into three age groups (3-4, 5-8 and 9-11 years) to examine the influence of age. Children between 5 and 8 years of age were less likely to blame the model compared with younger and older children. CONCLUSION: Preschoolers reported the lowest acceptance, indicating a need for intervention for children in this age range. Furthermore, it will be important to conduct longitudinal studies to determine the influence of interventions as the child passes through different developmental stages.
Subject(s)
Child Behavior/psychology , Overweight/psychology , Child , Child, Preschool , Cross-Sectional Studies , Female , Humans , Interpersonal Relations , Male , Peer Group , Prejudice , Sex Factors , Stereotyped Behavior , Videotape RecordingABSTRACT
Obesity, an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease, is more prevalent in the U.S. among Black than White women. Tolerance for obesity may be learned in childhood before weight gain begins. Greater tolerance for or approval of heavy daughters' body build and eating habits among Black mothers compared to White mothers could result in higher levels of body satisfaction in heavy Black daughters compared to heavy White daughters. This paper reports cross-sectional data from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Growth and Health Study on maternal reactions to daughters' body build and eating habits and on daughters' body satisfaction for 1,652 Black and White female parent/guardians and their daughters, aged nine and ten years at baseline. Results showed that Black mothers were less tolerant than White mothers of body build and habits among moderately heavy daughters, but Black mothers were more tolerant than White mothers of the build and habits of their heaviest daughters (p<0.001). However, maternal disapproval of their build and habits had little effect on daughters' body satisfaction (2.2% of variation explained). Black girls had higher body satisfaction scores than White girls (p<0.01). While body satisfaction scores decreased with increasing body mass index, they decreased less for Black girls than for White girls. The largest proportion of variation in daughters' body satisfaction (21.0%) was explained by race, body mass index, household income, and a race-body mass index interaction.
ABSTRACT
The evaluation and training of clinical trial staff who counsel patients in lifestyle changes for disease prevention is aided by a review of videorecorded interviews conducted with a simulated patient. This report describes the Inventory of Simulated Patient Characteristics, a listing of 34 generic parameters for developing a simulated patient for use in staff training and evaluation in counseling. The Inventory creates a complete person in all critical aspects of counseling for lifestyle change (e.g., daily routines, family, job). The Inventory was used in the Lipid Research Clinics' Coronary Primary Prevention Trial (CPPT) to examine the trial staff's skills in counseling for regimen adherence. In 1979 and 1980, 85 and 52 clinic staff, respectively, conducted a total of 548 interviews with four different simulated patients developed using the Inventory, and rated the portrayals as highly realistic. The Inventory also was used to verify that the simulated patient portrayals were greater than 90% faithful to their characterizations. While simulated patients limited to specific clinical syndromes have been used widely in medical education, no guidelines exist for their use in training trial staff in regimen counseling. The Inventory provides a simple template for creating simulated patients with broad characterizations that closely mimic actual trial participants.
