Recent Child and Adolescent Obesity Patterns in NYC: A Quantile/Binary Regression Analysis

Stuart H. Sweeney, University of California, Santa Barbara
Kevin J. Konty, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

U.S. obesity prevalence continues to trend upwards and policies have thus far failed to achieve widespread change. Within this broader context, child and adolescent obesity has also trended upwards and public schools have been recruited to monitor the trends and to serve as the test bed for nutritional outreach and fitness programs. New York City has been particularly aggressive in this regard with a large data collection effort since 2006 and extensive interventions targeting the schools. Our overriding goal in this paper is to describe recent patterns of child and adolescent obesity in NYC with particular focus on differences among race/ethnic groups, foreign-born/native-born, and association with socioeconomic status. We use quantile regression to assess patterns of association and to describe distributional changes among groups. We also assess patterns of prevalence difference using a recent methodology advance that links binary outcome models and quantile regression.