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Examining the Etiology of Childhood Obesity: The IDEA Study
Author(s) -
Lytle Leslie A.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
american journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.113
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1573-2770
pISSN - 0091-0562
DOI - 10.1007/s10464-009-9269-1
Subject(s) - operationalization , psychosocial , childhood obesity , health psychology , public health , longitudinal study , social ecological model , psychology , cohort study , conceptual framework , cohort , social environment , obesity , developmental psychology , medicine , overweight , sociology , psychiatry , social science , pathology , philosophy , nursing , epistemology
The prevalence of childhood obesity is of great public health concern. A social ecological framework that is transdisciplinary and multilevel by nature is recognized as the most promising approach for studying this problem. The purpose of this paper is to describe longitudinal research using a social ecological framework to study the etiology of childhood obesity. Individual and contextual factors are assessed in a cohort of youth and their parents including psychosocial factors, and home, school and neighborhood environments. The conceptual model guiding the research and the study design and measures used to operationalize the factors in the model and the descriptive characteristics of the baseline sample of youth and parents enrolled in the research are presented. The use of a conceptual model to guide the research, a transdisciplinary approach, a longitudinal cohort design and state‐of‐the‐art measures of the individual and the environment are strengths of this research.