Weight stigma amid pediatric healthcare providers: a cross-sectional survey study assessing the roles of weight controllability beliefs and blame
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Weight stigma affects healthcare providers' practice and contributes to poor patient outcomes. While it has been well-documented among providers of adult patients, research among providers of pediatric patients is limited and descriptive. The aim of this study was to answer the question: to what extent do pediatric healthcare professionals hold weight stigma towards patients and their parents, and what factors influence these attitudes? METHODS: An anonymous cross-sectional online survey was distributed from June-August 2023 to all healthcare workers, including providers-in-training, working with pediatric patients at a single centre in a province in central Canada. Participants who did not complete the survey, or who submitted it with excessive missing data, were removed. Primary outcome measures included weight stigma towards pediatric patients and their parents. RESULTS: 113 respondents were included. There was both a significant and positive direct effect of weight controllability beliefs on weight stigma towards parents (b = 0.58, 99% CI: 0.27, 0.89), as well as a significant and positive indirect effect, via blame (b = 0.33, 99% CI: 0.10, 0.61). Towards patients, there was a significant and positive indirect effect of weight controllability, via blame (b = 0.28, 99% CI: 0.08, 0.49). CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the importance of weight controllability beliefs in the stigma towards pediatric patients with higher body weights and their parents, and the ensuing blame that can occur when providers believe weight is within individual control. This work adds to the limited and descriptive weight stigma research on healthcare providers in pediatric healthcare settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".