Date of Award:

5-2014

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Educational Specialist (EdS)

Department:

Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

Gretchen Gimpel Peacock

Committee

Gretchen Gimpel Peacock

Committee

Donna Gilbertson

Committee

Scott DeBerard

Abstract

The current study examined attitudes toward and willingness to interact of 8th grade students toward their peers based on peer weight status. One-hundred-seventy primarily Caucasian, eighth-grade students (72 male, 98 female) from a public elementary school viewed a picture of a potential peer who was either average weight, overweight, or obese. After viewing the figure, participants completed The Adjective Checklist and The Shared Activity Questionnaire-B (SAQ-B. The Adjective Checklist measured attitudes toward obesity and the SAQ-B measured how they would interact with the potential peer in general social, academic, and active recreational situations. It was hypothesized that girls would rate average-weight figures more positively than overweight figures and overweight figures more positively than obese figures. It was also hypothesized that boys would rate average-weight figures more positively than overweight and obese figures, but without a significant difference between their ratings of the overweight and obese figures. Students' responses on the SAQ-B showed that they were significantly more willing to interact with an overweight peer than an obese peer in active-recreational situations. For overweight versus obese in the active-recreational domain, analyses also showed that there was a moderate effect overall (boys and girls combined) on responses, with small effects for girls and moderate effects for boys. Although there were no other statistically significant results effect sizes for the social and active recreational domains for average versus obese and overweight versus obese were almost all small to medium, whereas almost all effect sizes for academic were nonmeaningful. Therefore, it appears weight has less impact in academic interactions than the other two areas. Effect sizes were larger for males than females for overweight versus obese on the Adjective Checklist and SAQ-B social and active recreational, showing that males tended to hold more negative views of obesity than females in these areas.

Checksum

81e6fcc1efaff3562ff4e05f9580027e

Download

Included in

Psychology Commons

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .