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Category: Project

Description: Overweight and obesity (OWO) in childhood is a significant global public health challenge, affecting an increasing proportion of youth. Here we address why parents and health care professionals (HCPs) tend to miscategorise child BMI. In a visual analogue scale (VAS), task ppts rate the size of figures within an image set varying in BMI. This allows us to establish whether ppts can effectively and directionally distinguish between the figures of different BMI centiles. In a second task, ppts label each figure with one of English NHS National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) weight categories. This enables us to distinguish between potentially poor performance in the categorical task arising because participants are reluctant to assign higher weight categories to children (as such labels are associated with societal stigma) or simply because they cannot reliably detect the size differences between the figures. If ppts perform well on the VAS task, then an inability to distinguish between the size of bodies in a scale would be ruled out. Specifically, we ask whether there is a dissociation between