Concentrated Poverty in U.S. Schools and Adolescents' Risk of Being Overweight

• In Event: 585 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. School, Teacher, and Peer Effects

Abstract

The growing concentration of students from low-income families in schools does not only have consequences for academic disparities and educational inequality. Attending a high-poverty school may also negatively affect students’ physical health. Building on the school effects literature and drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; n = 18,924), we used multi-level modeling techniques to reveal that the concentration of students from low-income families in U.S. secondary schools was associated with students’ individual likelihood of being overweight, net of their own background characteristics and many other factors selecting them into their schools. The primary mediator of this association was the concentration of other overweight students in the school, a mediational pathway that partly reflected unhealthy dieting norms in schools with many overweight students but was not related to the prevalence of obesogenic behaviors, school norms around body size, and social stigma around body size in those schools.

Authors

• Jennifer March Augustine, University of South Carolina

• Julie Skalamera Olson, University of Texas at Austin

• Robert Crosnoe, University of Texas at Austin