Adolescent health briefDoes Early School Entry Prevent Obesity Among Adolescent Girls?
Section snippets
Data
The data for this study were obtained from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY97), an annual survey of a nationally representative cohort of adolescents born between 1980 and 1984. We used data collected between 1997 and 2006, restricting our sample to girls who had not yet graduated from high school and excluding those with missing body measures, those who were pregnant, and those who had repeated or skipped grades. Our final sample included 14,413 person-year records.
Measures
Results
The mean respondent age was 16.6 years. About 51.5, 26.4, and 22.1% of the sample were white, black, and Hispanic, respectively. A total of 40% of the girls had mothers who were overweight or obese; 46.9% had mothers who attended college, 32.8% had mothers who had graduated from high-school, and 20.2% had mothers who were high-school dropouts. The mean BMI of the girls was 23.4, with 18% being overweight and 12.2% being obese. About half of the girls were born before the admission cut-off
Discussion
This study explores the effect of the age of starting education on obesity among adolescent girls. It was found that early school entry might reduce girls' likelihood of becoming obese in their teen years. Thus, girls born a few days earlier than the cut-off dates were likely to interact with more mature adolescents in their educational cohort who might be more motivated to be slim [8]. An additional motivational factor might be the U.S. school health curriculum, which is grade-specific [9].
Acknowledgements
The authors are very grateful to John Cawley, Jordan Matsudaira, Kosali Simon, Donald Kenkel, George Jakubson, Byung-Kwang Yoo, and Obesity Luncheon at Cornell for many valuable suggestions. They also thank Pinky Chandra at the Cornell Restricted Access Data Center (CRADC) for her assistance to work on NLSY97-Geocode files. Dr. Q. Zhang was partially supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R03 HD056073).
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