Primary Submission Category: Health behaviors
A Multilevel Approach to Understanding Disordered Eating Disparities by Race/Ethnicity and Gender
Authors: Radhika Prasad
Presenting Author: Radhika Prasad*
Disordered eating is a behavioral symptom of eating disorders and is linked to other harmful health outcomes such as depression, osteoporosis, and substance abuse (Cheng et al. 2019). Much work on this topic has focused on white females. However, there is growing evidence suggesting that the risk of developing disordered eating is not restricted to a single race/ethnicity and gender. In particular, recent longitudinal studies show that Asian American and Hispanic male and female adolescents have higher prevalence of disordered eating compared to African American and White adolescents (Simone et al. 2022; Beccia et al. 2019). Little is known about the risk and protective factors shaping these disparities by race/ethnicity and gender at different levels of social context. My descriptive study aims to address this gap in the literature by using a multilevel conceptual framework to examine the following questions: (1) Which variables at the individual, family, and school level are most strongly associated with disordered eating during adolescence (2) Do the associations between variables at each level and disordered eating vary by race/ethnicity? I will use Waves 1-2 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health dataset and multilevel regression modeling to examine correlations at the individual, family, and school level. The first level will consist of individual level measures and the level two models will have family and school measures. Separate models will be run for males and females as prevalence of disordered eating are higher at different time points by gender. A moderating effect will be included in another set of models to examine whether the associations between variables at the different levels vary by race/ethnicity.