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Title: (How) Does Obesity Harm GPA? Stratification at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Body Size
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Branigan, Amelia R. |
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(How) Does Obesity Harm GPA? Stratification at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Body Size Presented: Chicago IL, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2015 Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: American Sociological Association Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Gender Differences; Grade Point Average (GPA)/Grades; High School; Obesity; Racial Differences Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. While the physical body is now broadly accepted as a sociological entity, conversation between researchers quantifying bodily characteristics and those theorizing the social construction of the body remains limited. In this study I bridge these literatures, drawing on feminist theory and education research to hypothesize a larger negative association between obesity and GPA for girls in English, where femininity is privileged, than in math, where stereotypical femininity is perceived to be a detriment. Among White girls in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, I find obesity in high school to be associated with a one-quarter standard deviation penalty on cumulative GPA in English, whereas any penalty of obesity on GPA in math is substantively small and statistically non-significant. In contrast, the negative relationship between obesity and GPA for White boys remains stable across course subjects. Net of controls, associations between obesity and GPA are not significant for Black or Hispanic students of either sex in either course subject. This study adds to a growing literature suggesting that the relationship between obesity and socioeconomic outcomes may result in large part from how institutions interact differently with bodies of different sizes, while challenging explanations that eschew social pathways altogether. It additionally emphasizes the need to better engage sociological theories of the body in quantitative inequality research, as doing so may alter both interpretation of results, and the questions that we ask. |
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Bibliography Citation
Branigan, Amelia R. "(How) Does Obesity Harm GPA? Stratification at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Body Size." Presented: Chicago IL, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2015. |