Kaisa Snellman

Increasing socioeconomic disparities in adolescent obesity.

Significance Childhood and youth obesity represent significant US public health challenges. Recent findings that the childhood obesity ‘‘epidemic’’ may have slightly abated have been met with relief from health professionals and popular media. However, we document that the overall trend in youth obesity rates masks a significant and growing class gap between youth from upper and lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Until 2002, obesity rates increased at similar rates for all adolescents, but since then, obesity has begun to decline among higher SES youth but continued to increase among lower SES youth. These results underscore the need to target public health interventions to disadvantaged youth who remain at risk, as well as to examine how health information circulates through class-biased channels. Recent reports suggest that the rapid growth in youth obesity seen in the 1980s and 1990s has plateaued. We examine changes in obesity among US adolescents aged 12–17 y by socioeconomic background using data from two nationally representative health surveys, the 1988–2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys and the 2003–2011 National Survey of Children’s Health. Although the overall obesity prevalence stabilized, this trend masks a growing socioeconomic gradient: The prevalence of obesity among high-socioeconomic status adolescents has decreased in recent years, whereas the prevalence of obesity among their low-socioeconomic status peers has continued to increase. Additional analyses suggest that socioeconomic differences in the levels of physical activity, as well as differences in calorie intake, may have contributed to the growing obesity gradient.

Customer complaining behaviour in technology‐based service encounters

Compares complaining behaviour in traditional and technology‐based service encounters. Drawing on 160 negative critical incidents within Finnish retail banking, shows that, contradictory to common predictions, there are no significant differences in the complaining rates between the two types of service encounters. Attributes this finding to the high reliance of traditional complaining methods in both types of service encounters. Finds, however, that complaints about technology‐based service encounters have significantly higher response rates than complaints about traditional service encounters. Also, when focusing on technology‐based service encounters, finds that customers who actually consider themselves guilty for the outcome were the most frequent complainers, while the ones attributing the outcome to technology failures or service process failures complain less often. These findings have interesting implications for designers of service recovery systems.

The Engagement Gap: Social Mobility and Extracurricular Participation among American Youth

Participation in extracurricular activities is associated with positive youth outcomes such as higher education attainment and greater future earnings. We present new analyses of four national longitudinal surveys of American high school students that reveal a sharp increase in the class gap in extracurricular involvement. Since the 1970s, upper-middle-class students have become increasingly active in school clubs and sport teams, while participation among working-class students has veered in the opposite direction. These growing gaps have emerged in the wake of rising income inequality, the introduction of “pay to play” programs, and increasing time and money investments by upper-middle-class parents in children’s development. These trends need to be taken into account in any new initiative to monitor mobility. They also present a challenge to the American ideal of equal opportunity insofar as participation in organized activities shapes patterns of social mobility.

Differences in Institutional Support by Sex

Differences in Institutional Support by Sex To the Editor Dr Sege and colleagues1 found that junior female faculty in the biomedical field received significantly less start-up funding from their institutions than men. Assessing the validity of this finding, however, is challenging for 2 reasons: they analyzed data on grant applicants, which may not be a representative sample of junior biomedical scientists, and they did not control for scientist subfield. Using data on grant applicants to study differences in institutional support is problematic because women submit fewer grant applications and are less likely to seek subsequent grants after receiving initial funding.2 For example, a study of National Institutes of Health career development award (K series) recipients found that men applied for subsequent grants at higher rates than women.3 This finding is consistent with research in psychology that shows that women have lower expectations for salary, are less likely to negotiate for additional compensation, and are more satisfied with lower pay.4,5 Thus, it is plausible that women who receive higher than average start-up packages from their institution decide not to apply for research grants from foundations like the one studied by Sege and colleagues and therefore are missing from the data set they analyzed. In other words, sex differences in start-up funding observed by Sege and colleagues could be a result of women with greater start-up packages not applying for research grants and not a true difference in institutional support. A better research strategy would be to analyze a sample of junior biomedical scientists that includes both those who apply for external grants and those who do not. Men may also work in subfields that require larger budgets. In this case, differences in funding levels would not mean womenarebeingunderfundedordiscriminatedagainst,butrathersimply reflect differences in funding needs. This is supported by the authors’ finding that there was no significant difference by sex in the start-up funding of clinical scientists; clinical research has smaller and less variant funding requirements than basic science. More comprehensive data and systematic research on early career funding of scientists and sex differences in funding are needed.

Women at Work: Getting Things Done Means Acknowledging our Differences

Women may only make up just under a quarter of senior leadership positions in organizations in the United States, but they still hold 52% of professional-level jobs – which require leadership and m...

Reply to Gao et al: Racial composition does not explain increasing class gaps in obesity

Our recent paper (1) shows that, since 2002, obesity prevalence has declined among higher socio-economic status (SES) youth but continued to increase among lower SES youth. Gao et al. (2) posit that the relative increase in obesity in the low SES population could be explained by an increasing concentration of black youth in the lower SES group or other race/ethnicity factors.