Are Feminine Body Weight Norms Different for Black Students or in Black Schools? Girls' Weight-Related Peer Acceptance across Racialized School Contexts.

Adolescent girls with overweight or obesity are less socially integrated than their thinner peers. We examine racial-ethnic differences in girls' weight-related friendship patterns, especially noting Black-white distinctions given their different norms about the ideal feminine form. We also test whether schools with more Black students see diminished weight-related differences in peer integration for all girls and/or for Black girls. Using 1994-1995 data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we predict the number of friendship nominations girls receive conditional on their weight status, race-ethnicity, and school's racial composition. Both white and Black girls with overweight or obesity are less integrated than their thinner peers regardless of the school's Black enrollment rate. Hispanic girls with overweight are more integrated than white girls with overweight, particularly in schools with low Black enrollments. The relative consistency of girls' weight-related friendship patterns demonstrates the ubiquity of dominant feminine thinness norms.

What veteran parishes can teach us: How long-serving Spanish-language ministries successfully integrate Latinos within the parish.

Catholic parishes in the United States have included Hispanics for centuries, but large numbers of multi-racial parishes engaged in Hispanic ministry have emerged in the past few decades. Research on non-Catholic congregations suggests positives and negatives for members in multi-racial settings, but sources of multi-racial Catholic parish formation are distinct enough to suggest different possible outcomes. We use data from the National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry (Ospino, 2015) to assess the integration of various Hispanic sub-groups within parishes. We distinguish parishes by time period in which they began serving Hispanics and highlight the relative success of veteran parishes (those who began Spanish-language ministry prior to 1980). Importantly, veteran parishes are more likely to consistently celebrate bilingual liturgies and to be disproportionately composed of Latinos. Both factors help explain veteran parishes' greater success in integrating immigrant Latinos.

Increasing public support for food-industry related, obesity prevention policies: The role of a taste-engineering frame and contextualized values.

BACKGROUND: Support for policies to combat obesity is often undermined by a public sense that obesity is largely a matter of personal responsibility. Industry rhetoric is a major contributor to this perception, as the soda/fast food/big food companies emphasize choice and individual agency in their efforts to neutralize policies that are burdensome. Yet obesity experts recognize that environmental forces play a major role in obesity. We investigate whether exposure to a taste-engineering frame increases support for food and beverage policies that address obesity. A taste-engineering frame details strategies used by the food industry to engineer preferences and increase the over-consumption of processed foods and sugary beverages. We also examine the effects of exposure to two contextualized values that have recently been promoted in expert discourse-consumer knowledge and consumer safety - on public support of policies. Our research shows how causal frames and contextualized values may effectively produce support for new obesity policies. METHODS: We use an online survey experiment to test the effects of exposure to a taste-engineering frame (TEF), the value of consumer knowledge (CK), or the value of consumer safety (CS), on level of support for a range of policies. A random sample of adults, age 18 + living in the United States was included in the study (N = 2580). Ordered logistic regression was used to measure the effects of treatment exposure. The primary outcome was level-of-support for four (4) food-industry related, obesity prevention policies (aka food and beverage policies): 1) require food-manufacturers to disclose the amount of additives in food products on food packaging; 2) require food-manufacturers to advertise food products in accordance with their actual nutritional value; 3) prohibit all high-fat, high-sugar food advertising on television programming watched primarily by children; and 4) increase healthy food availability in work sites, schools, and hospitals. FINDINGS: These data suggest that a taste-engineering frame and contextualized values significantly increase public support for many of the food and beverage policies tested. CONCLUSIONS: Applying a taste-engineering frame and/or contextualized values to address obesity advances a population-based policy agenda to counteract the effects of food-industry strategies.