AccScience Publishing / IJPS / Volume 8 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.36922/ijps.v8i1.334
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Disaggregating the longitudinal association between urbanization and body weight in Chinese adults over 1991 – 2015

Hongwei Xu1*
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1 Department of Sociology, CUNY-Queens College, New York, United States
IJPS 2022, 8(1), 75–87; https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.v8i1.334
Submitted: 9 March 2022 | Accepted: 16 August 2022 | Published: 8 September 2022
© 2022 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

Urbanization is widely viewed as a major contextual force behind the rising prevalence of overweight and obese people in developing countries. Research in China often conflates between-community difference and within-community change - two separate processes of urbanization that are related to body weight gain. Capitalizing on longitudinal and multilevel data from the 1991 to 2015 China Health and Nutrition Survey, the present study disaggregated the association between change in a community-level urbanicity index and change in individual-level body weight status over time in Chinese adults aged 18–65 years. A positive longitudinal relationship was confirmed between urbanicity and body weight in men, but varied in women by the choice of anthropometric measure. However, for both men and women, such an overall association was largely driven by preexisting between-community differences in the level of urbanization rather than an intrinsic within-community urbanization process. This pattern is robust against two different disaggregation methods. These findings together confirm the inadequate simplicity of the conventional model of community effects on health and nutrition.

Keywords
Community
Overweight
Obesity
Funding
Lieberthal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan
Cycle 50 PSC-CUNY Research Award from City University of New York – Queens College
National Institute for Health (NIH)
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)
NIH Fogarty grant
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Conflict of interest
No conflicts of interest were reported by the author.
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