SOCIOLOGY EDUCATION - American Sociological Association

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256 Crosnoe Table 5. Selected Results from Final Logistic Regressions Predicting Wave III College Enrollment Among Girls (n = 4,865 girls) Variable Odds Ratios Obesity .67** Wave II Adjustment Factors Self-rejection .82+ Suicidal ideation .79* Alcohol use .94* Marijuana use .90*** Class failures .48*** Truancy .91*** Note: This model also controlled for grade level, race/ethnicity, family structure, parental education, school level, school sector, school minority representation, school proportion of collegeeducated parents, measured ability, athletic status, number of friends, involvement with friends, romantic involvement, proportion of obese girls in the school, and proportion of obese boys in the school. *** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05, + p < .10. cational attainment is a foundation of the adult life course, including health and mortality, this role of obesity in education has farreaching consequences (Kerckhoff 1993; Mirowsky and Ross 2003). An analysis of longitudinal, nationally representative data supported this conceptual model for girls only. Obese girls were less likely to enter college after high school than were their nonobese peers. This association between obesity during middle school or high school and college enrollment after high school persisted despite controls for numerous demographic, school, adolescent, and social factors that could conceivably select girls into obesity and truncated educational trajectories and held across several different binary and categorical measurements of the dependent variable. Finally, the association between obesity and college enrollment was particularly strong among nonwhite girls with non-college-educated parents and in schools with few obese girls in the student body. To unpack this finding, I considered several different psychosocial mediators. First, obesity significantly predicted increasing rates of self-rejection, suicidal ideation, and class failure and marginally predicted increasing rates of alcohol and drug use. Moreover, obesity predicted increasing rates of truancy in schools in which obesity was rare. Second, suicidal ideation, alcohol use, drug use, class failure, and truancy all significantly predicted lower odds of matriculating in college after high school, and self-rejection marginally predicted these lower odds. Third, adjusting for psychosocial factors reduced the association between obesity and college enrollment. This adjustment did not eliminate this association, nor did it alter the strength of the interaction between obesity on the individual and school levels. Thus, the psychosocial correlates of obesity explained a part of the link between obesity and college enrollment, in general, but did not explain the greater strength of this link in schools in which obesity was rare. In other words, psychosocial adjustment appeared to be more important to understanding the educational risks of the general stigma of obesity in American youth culture than to understanding why these risks may vary as a function of the local intensity of this stigma in specific school-based cultures. That girls, rather than boys, seem to be more vulnerable to the nonhealth risks of obesity echoes two prominent themes in research and theory on gender. The first is that the body and appearance are more central to the selfconcept of girls than of boys, usually in unhealthy and damaging ways (see Brumberg’s 1997 book The Body Project). The findings of my study extend that rich literature by demonstrating that the psychosocial side of the body project has consequences that extend beyond
Gender, Obesity, and Education 257 mental health and interpersonal functioning. Indeed, it appears to disrupt educational attainment in ways that counter many of the concrete advantages that girls have in the educational system. As obesity rates increase, the ramifications of this gender inequality among obese youths may become more pronounced in the general population. The second theme is that psychosocial phenomena (e.g., self-perceptions and cultural norms) have greater effects on the education of girls than of boys, often in ways that hurt girls (see Correll 2001). The findings add that self- and other assessments of nonacademic traits, such as obesity, can undermine girls’ educational careers in much the same way as girls’ misperceptions of their ability. In the future, this conceptual model should be tested more comprehensively and then elaborated. As one example, the social stigma of obesity that is the linchpin of the conceptual model was not tested directly in this study. Instead, it was implied by associations between obesity and aspects of psychosocial maladjustment. Add Health does not contain good data on what young people think about obesity or on teasing, bullying, social aggression, and other clear manifestations of social stigma. One possible opportunity for unpacking the social stigma of obesity is the upcoming adolescent extension of the long-running NICHD Study of Early Child Care, which has rich data on peer victimization, obesity, and education. Qualitative research will also be useful in figuring out how obesity is perceived and treated among young people in school. As another example, the peer context was measured somewhat bluntly here as the general characteristics of the full student body. Peer networks, which are available in Add Health, and course-taking groups, which are now available through the educational supplement to Add Health (see Muller et al. 2007), may be more appropriate levels of analysis for understanding local peer cultures. Another limitation of the study that needs to be addressed in the future is the unexplained portion of the association between obesity and college enrollment. Although the aspects of psychosocial adjustment that were considered here did factor into the lower rates of college enrollment among obese girls, some other mechanisms may have been at work, possibly poor health, missed course work related to poor health, or discrimination. These possibilities must eventually be examined in tandem with, and in contrast to, psychosocial pathways to determine the best ways to help obese youths in their educational endeavors. In closing, I want to connect this study to two larger themes in research on education and health. First, academic progress is about more than navigating the formal curriculum; it is also about connecting to others and, through these connections, developing a sense of self (Wigfield and Eccles 2002). Thus, how students fit in with or stand out from their peers at school is of the utmost importance to their educational pathways. Rather than chalking up the social challenges of school life as harmless parts of growing up, therefore, we need to assess the risks that are associated with these challenges as ways of easing passage through the educational system (Eder et al. 1995; McFarland 2001). Second, the enormous literature on the physical consequences of obesity has generated alarm among many scientists about the future health of the American public, which, in turn, has generated a backlash in certain sectors that this alarm is overstated (see Campos et al. 2006 and counterpoints for an overview of this debate). Regardless of who “wins” this debate, this study and studies like it (see Brownell et al.’s 2005 Weight Bias) suggest a reconsideration of the implications of rising rates of obesity. If the public health threat is so severe, then the psychosocial consequences of obesity that have been documented here suggest a double disadvantage of obesity in the future. If the public health threat is overblown, then these consequences are the real risks of obesity. In both cases, reducing the stigma of obesity in American society will enhance the lives of obese girls as they grow up. NOTES 1. Although not pictured in the conceptual model, both the bidirectional nature of the focal pathways (e.g., psychosocial adjustment affecting obesity) and the alternative pathways (e.g., positive psychosocial responses to obesi-
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SOCIOLOGY EDUCATION - American Sociological Association

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