Medical Students’ Attitudes towards Overweight and Obesity

Birte Pantenburg, Claudia Sikorski, Melanie Luppa, Georg Schomerus, Hans-Helmut König, Perla Werner and Steffi G Riedel-Heller

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 11, 1-8

Abstract: Objective: Studies from the USA have identified medical students as a major source of stigmatizing attitudes towards overweight and obese individuals. As data from Europe is scarce, medical students’ attitudes were investigated at the University of Leipzig in Leipzig, Germany. Design: Cross-sectional survey containing an experimental manipulation consisting of a pair of vignettes depicting an obese and a normal weight 42-year-old woman, respectively. Vignettes were followed by the Fat Phobia Scale (FPS), a semantic differential assessing weight related attitudes. In case of the overweight vignette a panel of questions on causal attribution for the overweight preceded administration of the FPS. Subjects: 671 medical students were enrolled at the University of Leipzig from May to June 2011. Results: The overweight vignette was rated significantly more negative than the normal weight vignette (mean FPS score 3.65±0.45 versus 2.54±0.38, p

Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0048113

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0048113

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