Children's acceptance of a peer who is overweight: relations among gender, age and blame for weight status.

OBJECTIVE

To examine the role of blame as a mediator of the relationships between perceiver age and gender and children's acceptance of an overweight peer.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional study of children's perceptions of their overweight peers using structural equation modeling.

PARTICIPANTS

Two hundred and ninety-one children between the ages of 3 and 11 years.

MEASUREMENTS: Children viewed a videotape of a same-sex peer, dressed to appear overweight, interacting with an adult. After viewing the videotape, children responded to items assessing their perceptions of the child's social and emotional traits and how much the child was to blame for being overweight.

Results

Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the traits loaded on a single factor, acceptance.

RESULTS

of analyses for our structural equation model indicated that as blame increased, acceptance of the peer decreased. The relationships between gender and blame and gender and acceptance were not significant. Children were categorized into three age groups (3-4, 5-8 and 9-11 years) to examine the influence of age. Children between 5 and 8 years of age were less likely to blame the model compared with younger and older children.

CONCLUSION

Preschoolers reported the lowest acceptance, indicating a need for intervention for children in this age range. Furthermore, it will be important to conduct longitudinal studies to determine the influence of interventions as the child passes through different developmental stages.