The interaction between parent perceived stress and ethnicity on weight in adolescents

Since obesity has a great impact on psychological and physical health, and Latino adolescents have the highest prevalence of obesity compared to adolescents of other ethnicities, there is a need to understand what contributes to this discrepancy (CDC, 2012; Must & Strauss, 1999; Ogden et al., 2014). The purpose of this study is to investigate some of the potential causes of adolescent weight and obesity; specifically how family stress and ethnicity interact to influence adolescent weight, and thus obesity. Other variables that may be involved, such as parent preferred language, parent education level, and the adolescent’s sex, are examined as well. This document proposes recruiting parent and adolescent dyads from a variety of primary care clinics around Austin when the adolescent comes in for a yearly preventive check-up. Data on parent stress, adolescent weight, adolescent ethnicity, adolescent sex, parent education level, and parent language preference are collected. These variables will be examined to investigate the hypothesis that the weight of Hispanic adolescents is more influenced by family stress (as measured by parent stress level) than the weight of adolescents of other ethnicities.