Descripción: |
Childhood obesity is heavily documented as a public health crisis in the United
States. Today, more than one-third of American youth can be medically classified as
overweight or obese. Of those children, a disproportionately high number are Hispanic.
There is a clear need for childhood obesity policy interventions with above average
effectiveness in this expanding ethnic group, but the vast majority of the interventions
implemented to date have not generated significant or lasting decreases in the levels of
Hispanic childhood obesity. This thesis starts with the question: why? I hypothesize that
these policies chronically fail to reach Hispanic youth because they are not attentive to the
sociocultural uniqueness of this population.
Importantly, the robust professional discourse on the childhood obesity epidemic
recognizes the nature of the problem as hugely complex. Given the high levels of Hispanic
childhood obesity in the United States, a branch of the professional pursuit of knowledge
focuses just on how the epidemiology of Hispanic childhood obesity departs from the
epidemiology of general population childhood obesity. In this thesis, though, I argue that the
richness of the professional discourse does not translate into the realm of public opinion. The
information that does survive the filter of the public opinion process has been woven into two
dominant “frames” of the childhood obesity problem: a “personal responsibility” frame and a
“social responsibility” frame. Each public opinion frame represents a narrow
“understanding” of the problem, includes a judgment about who or what is responsible for
this epidemic, and influences the design of contemporary childhood obesity policies.
Notably, neither of these frames closely appreciates the sociocultural distinctiveness of
Hispanic youth; rather, the childhood obesity policies derived from both frames are usually
“one size fits all.”
An independent case study of Hispanic childhood obesity in New Jersey, anchored by
analysis of the New Jersey Childhood Obesity Study (2009-2010), yields three claims of
special interest to this thesis. First, the design of this Study, which was commissioned to
contribute to New Jersey’s pre-existing policy endeavor, validates the enormous influence of
the dominant public opinion frames of childhood obesity on related policy endeavors.
Second, the evidence marshaled from Hispanic respondents of this Study confirms that the
two dominant public opinion frames capture, in fact, real forces contributing to Hispanic
childhood obesity. Respondents acknowledged both unhealthy behaviors (the foundation of
the “personal responsibility” frame), and environmental barriers to good health (the
foundation of the “social responsibility” frame). And yet, third, there exists in this data a
fundamental “disconnect.” Hispanic respondents’ positive perceptions of their children’s
weight, the quality of nutrition and levels of exercise their children receive, are inconsistent,
from a medical standpoint, with the more objective data about these children’s behaviors and
lifestyles described by the same respondents.
By bringing to bear a class of childhood obesity scholarship lost in the public opinion
process, I reach the conclusion that this conceptual “disconnect” illuminates a unique,
sociocultural conceptualization of “health” and a “healthy weight” operating in the Hispanic
population, particularly among those still acculturating to America’s “medicalized” society.
Going forward, childhood obesity policies aiming to reach Hispanic youth and their families
must be rendered more culturally relevant, and more attentive to the unique challenge of a
bicultural lifestyle faced by many Hispanics. |