Health and Eating Behavior Differs between Lean/Normal and Overweight/Obese Low-Income Women Living in Food-Insecure Environments

Abstract

For low-income women, personal and behavioral factors may modify the influence of their obesogenic food environment. Further research within the context of SCT should examine differences between lean/normal and overweight/obese women living in the same environment.

Environmental, Personal, and Behavioral Factors Are Related to Body Mass Index in a Group of Multi-Ethnic, Low-Income Women

“…Questions from the formative focus-group phase of this research were selected based on the principal investigator's previous research with lowincome women. [4][5][6]17,[32][33][34][35] During the focus-group discussions, emotional eating, health beliefs, and physical activity emerged as themes, 16 and these themes shaped survey questions. In addition, both focus-group questions and survey questions were framed within the context of SCT's main constructs (ie, environmental, personal, and behavioral) and supporting components.…”

“…Development of theoretically based survey questions was informed by qualitative data collected in 16 focus-group discussions, with a total of 83 low-income women living in the same geographical area as survey participants, 16 and a review of the literature. Questions from the formative focus-group phase of this research were selected based on the principal investigator's previous research with lowincome women.…”

“…This was illustrated in a recent qualitative study in which low-income overweight/obese participants more frequently described emotional-eating tendencies than low-income lean/normal participants. 16 A few quantitative measures of emotional eating among low-income women have suggested an association between emotional eating and increased weight, [17][18][19] which has also been established in the general population. 20,21 Similarly, other personal factors have been linked to weight across demographic groups, but have not been thoroughly investigated within the low-income demographic group.…”

“…30,31 This theory describes human behavior as a reciprocal interaction between environmental, personal, and behavioral factors. Utilizing SCT as a framework and building on previous research, 16 the aim of this study was to determine SCT and self-identity associations of both healthier and less healthy BMI. Importantly, this may contribute to an expanded understanding of factors influencing weight variation of women living in an obesogenic, low-income environment, and help to shape more individualized and effective interventions within this high-risk population group.…”

Smart Homes and Sensors for Surveillance and Preventive Education at Home: Example of Obesity

“…Some of them are based on system dynamics [28,67,68] and intend to explain the transmission of obesity at the population level, while investigating at the individual one, others are using techniques of network analysis [5,53,69] or agent-based models [54,66]. In this wide range of theoretical approaches for modelling and simulating the transmission of obesity, the authors in [9] suggest that the analysis of social networks is the best systemic method for studying obesity spread.…”