SOCIOLOGY EDUCATION - American Sociological Association

246 Crosnoe
Halpern et al. 2005; Needham and Crosnoe
2005). Even though such gender differences
are less sharp in some races or social classes,
the stakes of obesity are typically higher for
girls, in general. Thus, although girls may be
less likely than boys to take part in things like
substance use or academic disengagement in
general, they are probably more likely to do
so in response to obesity.
Second, the power of school context to
condition the internalization and externalization
of the stigma of obesity (Path B in Figure
1) will also be stronger for girls for many of
the same reasons. If girls are generally more
sensitive to norms about weight, then the
adjustment of obese girls should be more
affected by how these girls measure up to
local norms about weight, just as it is more
affected by general norms. At the same time,
a good deal of developmental research has
demonstrated that girls are more ingrained in
and reactive to social networks, especially
their personal relationships, and are more
likely to use feedback from significant others
when they evaluate themselves (Giordano
2003; Martin 1996). Thus, being out of step
with schoolmates in terms of weight will have
a greater impact on girls.
If this conceptual model is a better fit for
girls than for boys, then the psychosocial
costs of obesity will be more important to
understanding obesity-related educational
disparities in the female population. More
generally, these costs will be another disadvantage,
along with discrimination and other
powerful forces, that women face in the status
attainment process.
METHODS
Data
To test the conceptual model in Figure 1, I
drew on nationally representative data from
the National Longitudinal Study of
Adolescent Health (Add Health), an ongoing
study of American adolescents in Grades
7–12 that began in 1994 (Bearman, Jones,
and Udry 1997). With a multistage, stratified
design, Add Health selected 80 schools from
a comprehensive list of American high
schools on the basis of their region, urbanicity,
sector, racial composition, and size. Each
selected school was then matched to one of
its feeder schools, typically a middle school,
with the probability of the feeder school
being selected proportional to its contribution
to the high school’s student body. The
final sample included 132 schools. Nearly all
the students in each school (approximately
90,000) completed a limited paper-and-pencil
questionnaire, the In-School Survey, in the
1994–95 school year. These students became
the sampling frame for three in-depth inhome
interviews. A representative subsample
of the In-School sample, selected evenly
across high schools and pairs of feeder
schools, participated in Wave I in 1995 (n =
20,475), Wave II in 1996 (n = 14,736), and
Wave III in 2002 (n = 15,197). The Wave II
sample excluded all Wave I seniors. The Wave
III sample, however, attempted to bring these
Wave I seniors back in.
The analytic sample for the study included
all adolescents who participated in Waves I–III
and had valid sampling weights (n = 10,829
adolescents in 128 schools). White girls with
more educated parents were slightly overrepresented
in this analytic sample compared to
the original Wave I sample, but the obesity
rate was the same. This bias must be remembered
in the interpretation of the results. Still,
these selection filters were necessary—the
longitudinal filter to establish the proper temporal
ordering of variables in the theoretical
model and the weighting filter to adjust for
the complex sampling frame of Add Health
(Chantala and Tabor 1999).
Measures
Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for all
the study variables. Because of the centrality
of gender to this study, these statistics are
presented for the full sample and then for
each gender. All significant gender differences,
tested with a one-way analysis of variance
(ANOVA), have been noted.
College Enrollment Wave III responses to
questions about schooling were collapsed
into a binary measure of college enrollment.
In this measure, young people who were