SOCIOLOGY EDUCATION - American Sociological Association

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250 Crosnoe <strong>American</strong>, and other race/ethnicity), family structure (1 = adolescent lived with both biological parents, 0 = another family form), and parental education (1 = less than high school graduation, 2 = high school graduate, 3 = some college, 4 = college graduate, 5 = postgraduate—maximum level taken in two-parent families). The second category, school characteristics, includes four factors. School level (1 = middle school, 0 = high school or comprehensive school) and sector (1 = private, 0 = public) were based on the reports of school administrators at Wave I. Because the In- School Survey was a near-census of each school, reports of parental education and race/ethnicity in this survey could be aggregated within schools to measure the proportion of students in each school who were nonwhite and had at least one parent with a college degree. The third category, adolescents’ characteristics, includes measured ability (percentile scores on a modified version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) and athletic status (1 = adolescent on a sports team at school, 0 = no participation). The fourth category, social relationships, includes two network-derived items: number of friends (a count of friends nominated by the adolescent) and involvement with friends (the sum of whether or not the adolescent had hung out with, talked with, spent time with, or visited the nominated friend in the past week, averaged across all nominated friends). Romantic involvement was a binary measure (1 = adolescent reported having a serious boyfriend or girlfriend, 0 = no such relationship). Plan of Analyses The analyses proceeded in two general steps, with some preliminary and ancillary analyses along the way. In the first step, Wave III college enrollment was regressed on the Wave I selection factors, adolescent obesity, the two measures of the prevalence of obesity in the school, and then interactions between adolescent obesity and the two school obesity measures. The results of these models assessed differences in college enrollment after high school by obesity category during middle school or high school and the degree to which these differences varied according to the proportion of the student body of the school made up of obese girls or boys. If these initial models revealed significant obesity-related differences in college enrollment, then the second step was to investigate possible psychosocial mediators of these differences. This investigation required that obesity be associated with the psychosocial factors (Path A1 in Figure 1); that the psychosocial factors be associated with college enrollment (Path A2 in Figure 1); and, finally, that taking the psychosocial factors into account attenuated the initially observed associations between obesity and college enrollment. To establish mediation in this way, the six Wave II psychosocial adjustment factors were first regressed on Wave I selection factors (including the Wave I version of the psychosocial factors), adolescent obesity, the two measures of the prevalence of obesity in the school, and then interactions between adolescent obesity and the two school obesity measures. These models demonstrated whether obesity was associated with changes in six psychosocial problems over a one-year period and whether these associations varied by the proportion of obese boys and girls in school (testing Paths A1 and B in Figure 1). Next, the original college-enrollment models were expanded to include these six Wave II psychosocial factors. 2 The results of these models gauged the degree of association between psychosocial adjustment during secondary school and college enrollment after secondary school (testing Path A2 in Figure 1). Moreover, a comparison of the obesity coefficients and the obesity x school obesity interaction terms before and after the inclusion of these psychosocial factors revealed the degree to which the association between Wave I obesity and Wave III college enrollment—and the school-by-school variation in this association—was explained by psychosocial adjustment at Wave II. All the models were estimated separately for boys and girls with the mixed procedure, the SAS version of multilevel modeling (Singer 1998). Multilevel techniques provided the most accurate estimates of school effects and corrected the violations of independence
Gender, Obesity, and Education 251 that were created by the school-based sampling frame (Chantala and Tabor 1999). Because all the outcomes that were examined in this study were either binary, count, or countlike ordinal variables, the glimmix macro was used to convert the mixed procedure to logistic and Poisson regression. All the models contained a random intercept for the outcome and a random slope for obesity, and all the variance components were statistically significant (p < .001). RESULTS A Profile of Obese Adolescents and Their Peers Adolescents whose BMI reached the threshold for obesity at Wave I differed from their nonobese peers in multiple ways, both during and after their secondary school careers. Most important, only 23 percent enrolled in college after high school, compared to 35 percent of their nonobese peers. They were also more likely to be boys (57 percent versus 46 percent of nonobese youths) and racial/ethnic minorities (45 percent were African <strong>American</strong> or Latino/Latina versus 36 percent of nonobese youths). Moreover, the average level of parental education was in the range of a high school diploma (2.79) for the obese youths but in the range of some college (3.00) for the nonobese youths. Finally, the obese adolescents had significantly higher mean levels of self-rejection, class failures, and truancy than did their nonobese peers, but they did not differ significantly from these peers in terms of suicidal ideation or substance use. Obesity and College Enrollment The descriptive statistics just presented provide preliminary evidence that young people who were obese during middle school and high school had lower rates of college matriculation in the period after high school than did their peers. Moreover, they suggest that the fewer socioeconomic resources and greater psychosocial risks of obese youths may be reasons for these lower rates. Table 2 presents the results of logistic regressions that more accurately estimate the longitudinal association between adolescents’ obesity and college enrollment, net of numerous demographic, school, adolescent, and social characteristics that are associated with both obesity and educational attainment. For the boys, obesity at Wave I was not significantly associated with being enrolled in, or having graduated from, college at Wave III once the four sets of selection factors (demographic, school, adolescent, social) were taken into account. Additional analyses not shown in Table 2 revealed no significant interaction between boys’ obesity and the proportion of obese boys (or girls) in the school. For the girls, however, obesity at Wave I was associated with significantly lower odds of attending college at Wave III. Obese girls had 50 percent lower odds (1 – OR x 100) of being in (or having graduated from) college during this period than did nonobese girls, net of all four sets of Wave I selection factors. Again, two interaction terms were added to this base model: obesity x the proportion of obese boys in the school and obesity x the proportion of obese girls in the school. The former was not statistically significant, but the latter was (p < .001). Because odds ratios are not appropriate for interaction terms, I used the significant logistic coefficients of obesity, proportion of obese girls in the school, and the interaction between the two to calculate the predicted odds of college enrollment for different groups of girls. Specifically, I calculated the odds of Wave III college enrollment for obese and nonobese girls who went to schools with no other obese girls and who went to schools in which 10 percent of the student body was made up of obese girls (one standard deviation above the mean on this school variable). In doing so, I held all other variables in the model to their sample means. Nonobese girls generally had better odds (about 18 percent higher) of attending college when they attended schools in which no obese girls could be found in the student body than when they attended schools in which obese girls made up a relatively large proportion of the student body. Conversely, obese girls generally had better odds (about
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