Social network characteristics among adolescents at risk of obesity: a pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTContext: Youth obesity has become a global epidemic. Identification of modifiable determinants is needed to develop effective prevention strategies. The Socio-Ecological Model suggests that physical and social environments can both support and inhibit behaviours related to healthy weight. Aspects of one’s personal social network (e.g. size, mode of interactions with contacts, and mean age of network members) might influence health outcomes, such as adiposity in adolescents. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a conceptual framework, which allows us to investigate the potential relationship of social network characteristics on health-related outcomes. To this end, we developed a questionnaire designed to measure the personal social networks of adolescents and conducted a pilot study.Objective: The main objectives were to describe the structure and characteristics of adolescents’ social networks and to examine whether patterns emerged in relation to adiposity. Methods: We conducted a SNA pilot study nested within the QUALITY study, an ongoing longitudinal study, established in 2005 and designed to investigate the natural history of obesity in Quebec, Canada (n = 630 at baseline). Data were obtained from 46 adolescents during the 3rd phase of data collection when participants were aged 15-17 years old. The outcome was participant’s total body fat percentage measured by Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (%BF). With respect to the SNA data collection, participants (egos) identified up to 10 friends (alters) with whom they discussed important matters. Participants also reported both their own and perceived alters’ lifestyle behaviours, and connections between alters. Characteristics of alters were combined to create the following indicators of support and encouragement: Positive role models (friends who often or sometimes participated in physical activities and eating healthy food), of cheerleaders (positive role models who often or sometimes encouraged the ego to be physically active) and negative role models (friends who rarely or never participated in physical activity and who rarely or never ate healthfully). For each indicator, proportions were computed for each ego network. Analysis: Descriptive statistics were generated for all variables, including network- and ego-level variables. Correlations were computed between all variables, and notably with the outcome, %BF. Sex-specific multilinear regression analyses were performed to further explore the relationship between potential network features and adiposity. Results: The final analytical sample included 28 boys and 16 girls with an average age for both of 16.3 years, and a total of 207 alters. The average %BF was 19.8% for boys and 34.2% for girls. The average proportion of cheerleaders in the network of boys was on average 0.23 and for girls an average of 0.14. Among boys, each increase in tertile of cheerleaders was associated with a decrease in the %BF by almost 8%. In contrast, a modest positive association was observed in girls.Conclusion: Perceived behaviours and encouragement of friends may be associated with adiposity in high-risk youth, but this relationship appears to differ between adolescent boys and girls. Although longitudinal investigations are needed, these preliminary findings suggest that leveraging social networks to enhance lifestyle interventions likely need to be sensitive to gender-based beliefs.Keywords: Obesity, adolescents, pilot study, questionnaire, weight-related lifestyle behaviours, friends, social network
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".