 Parental misclassification of child overweight/obese status: The role of parental education and parental weight statusJohn Cullinan and John Cawley Economics & Human Biology, 2017, vol. 24, issue C, 92-103 Abstract: Childhood overweight and obesity is a major public health challenge for policymakers in many countries. As the most common supervisors of children’s activities, parents have a potentially important role to play in obesity prevention. However, a precondition for parents to improve their children’s diets, encourage them to be more physically active, or take them to see a doctor about their weight is for the parent to first recognize that their child is overweight or obese. This paper examines the extent of parental misclassification of child weight status, and its correlates, focusing on the role of parental education and the parent’s own obesity status. We find evidence that, among non-obese parents, those who are better-educated report their child’s weight status more accurately, but among obese parents, the better-educated are 45.18% more likely than parents with lower secondary education to give a false negative report of their child’s overweight/obesity; this may reflect social desirability bias. Keywords: Child overweight and obesity; Reporting error; Parental misclassification; Education; Social desirability bias (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:24:y:2017:i:c:p:92-103 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2016.11.001 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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