The media is constantly bombarding us with the topic of weight to the point where it has become somewhat of an obsession in our society. Now there is no denying that we have seen an increase in obesity among Americans, which certainly makes us question our health and our overall lifestyle that can impact our weight. That being said, I want to investigate the following research questions: How can marital status as a factor impact an individual’s weight? How does gender and age impact weight gain or weight loss in terms of marital status? The independent variables for this project are age, gender, and marital status. Age is an interval-ratio variable, and gender and marital status are both nominal variables. Moving on to the dependent variable, weight is the outcome variable that I’ll be focusing on. Taking the level of measurement into account, weight is considered to be an interval ratio variable, but in this case it’s a nominal variable because it contains categories with the respondents’ possible opinions on what they consider their body type to be. These variables were chosen from the dataset provided by HINTS, which stands for Health Information National Trends Survey. As mentioned on their website, “HINTS collects nationally representative data routinely about the American public's use of cancer-related information” (http://hints.cancer.gov/). As of 2008, HINTS had a representative sample of 7,674 Americans, which has ultimately helped generate the current database. This national survey allows individuals to browse through their dataset that provides information regarding health, in particular cancer. With the use of the HINTS dataset users can gain knowledge of the variables that are listed and thus, find a correlation betwe...
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...iedman, M. , Dixon, A. , & Brownell, K. (1999). Marital Status, Marital Satisfaction, and Body Image Dissatisfaction. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 26(1), 81-85.
HINTS. http://hints.cancer.gov/
Sobal, J. , & Hanson, K. (2011). Marital Status, Marital History, Body Weight, and Obesity. Marriage & Family Review, 47(7), 474-504.
Sobal, J. , & Rauschenbach, B. (2003). Gender, Marital Status, and Body Weight in Older U.S. Adults. Gender Issues, 21(3), 75-94.
Sobal, J. , Rauschenbach, B. , & Frongillo, E. (2003). Marital Status Changes and Body Weight Changes: A U.S. Longitudinal Analysis. Social Science and Medicine, 56(7), 1543-1555.
Umberson, D., Liu, H., & Powers, D. (2009). Marital Status, Marital Transitions, and Body Weight. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 50(3), 327-343. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/61743878?accountid=9840
Kolotkin, Ronette L., Head, Susan, Hamilton, Michael, and Tse, Chiu-Kit J.. "Assessing Impact …..of Weight on Quality of Life." Obesity Research 3.1 (1995): 49-56. 6 Sept. 2012.
Ross, C. E. (1999). Overweight and depression. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 35(1), 63-79.
Interest in the social aspects of obesity is nothing new. Jeffrey Sobal has written extensively about the social and psychological consequences of obesity , including the stigmatisation and discrimination of obese and even overweight individuals (Sobal 2004).
In order to take a sociological viewpoint into account when one examines obesity, first it is important to understand how obesity is recognized in current society. According to today’s news articles and magazines and advertisements and other mass media about health and healthy life, one can easily realize that a great number of people have an eagerness to be healthy. Also, one can assume through these mass media about health that everyone wants to be attractive, and they are even prone to transform their own behaviors to gain attractiveness. This is because most people live a life where social interaction is frequently required and must engage themselves into social interaction every day of their life. Therefore, based on these ideas and proofs throughout this mass media, obesity is regarded as one of the characteristics that is disgraceful and undesirable in society.
Andrist, Linda C. "Media Images, Body Dissatisfaction, and Disordered Eating in Adolescent Women." Adolescent Health Mar. 2003, 28th ed., sec. 2: 119-23. Print.
Goldstein, Hesh. Why There is an Obesity Epidemic. 16 Nov. 2009. 12 Nov. 2011 .
"Obesity." Current Issues: Macmillian Social Science Library. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 21 Oct. 2015.
Flegal, K. M., Carroll, M. D., Ogden, C. L., & Curtin, L. R. (2010). Prevalence and trends in obesity among U.S. adults, 1999-2008. Journal of Medical Association. 303, 235-241.
Varney, Sarah. "For Obese, Intimate Lives Often Suffer." NPR. 21 Sept. 2011. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.
Body dissatisfaction is so common among women that it is considered a normative female experience (Knobloch-Westerwick & Crane, 2012). Nearly half of American women experience poor body image (Peterson, Tantleff-Dunn, & Bedwell, 2006). Not only does body dissatisfaction prompt women to attempt to control their weight and shape through dieting (Groesz, Levine, & Murnen, 2002), but it is strongly correlated with eating disorder symptoms (Peterson et al., 2006). Furthermore, body dissatisfaction has been associated with psychological issues such as depression, sexual dysfunction, social anxiety and suicidal behavior (Myers, Ridolfi, Crowther, & Ciesla, 2012). With so many women affected by body dissatisfaction and the associated risks being so severe, it is important to discuss and examine possible interventional methods.
Hanson, Richard R. "Optimizing Marital Success: The Conscious Couple Uniting Process." Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 32.1, TRANSLATIONAL APPLIED SOCIOLOGY (2009): 158-83. JSTOR.Web. 11 May 2014.
Groesz, L., Levine, M., & Murnen, S. (2001). The effect of experimental presentation of thin media images on body satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis review. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 1-16.
In marriage, weight gain is a major epidemic when it comes to divorce. When a couple gets married they are drawn to each other. They are in love with how the other person looks, and if one or both spouses gain weight they feel less and less attracted to each other. In the article “Could Your Weight Be Messing
In the last three decades, the growing epidemic of obesity has become one of the most colossal problems affecting people globally. This epidemic is contributed to not only socioeconomic status but to everything that is correlated with it such as race, gender, and level of education. When dealing with socioeconomic status, income is the major factor, but not much research is done on the cognitive factors that lie within each socioeconomic group (Ball, Crawford, , 2009). Normally the research on obesity is restricted to data found in the Unites States and refuses to include the statistics of other countries that might not be as developed, such as China (He, James, mu0pu, Zheng, 2014). Age is also another variable contributing to the unhealthy weight gain in the population worldwide. Childhood obesity has become such a big issue that programs are being implemented worldwide in attempts to prevent it early on (Cunningham, Gazmararian, Gonzalez-Casanova, Martorell ,Pratt, Sarmiento and Stein, 2013). Along with obesity in children, obesity is equally as common in adulthood and has grown twice as large since 1980 in Americans (Forjuoh, Lee, Ory, Une, 2013).
There is a complex connection between marriage and physical health. Whether you are happily married or not, there will be a positive or negative effect of the marriage. Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” presents the idea of modern day marriage from a feminine perspective as not just "a failure in intelligence" (p. 251 Women in Fiction) but also a form of bondage from which one must escape at all costs. Marriage seems as the metric by which the dominant cultural beliefs measures their standards.