Original articleBody Mass Index and Body Weight Perception as Risk Factors for Internalizing and Externalizing Problem Behavior Among Adolescents
Section snippets
Sample
A sample of 1826 pupils in the eighth grade of primary education and 5730 pupils in the first four years of secondary education (a total of 7556 students) completed the questionnaires. This sample from the Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) study is representative for the Dutch population of school children aged 11–16 years. Detailed descriptions of the sampling procedure can be found in [33].
Data collection
All data were collected with questionnaires, which were distributed in classes and
Descriptive results
Table 1 shows BMI and BWP scores and the correspondence between these two scores by Gender and Age. In the 11–16-year-old age category, 5.8% of both Dutch boys and girls are underweight, whereas 10.1% of the boys and 8.3% of the girls are overweight. During adolescence, the percentage of both underweight boys and girls decreases from approximately 6% at age 11 to 4.5% and 3.4%, respectively, at age 16. The proportion of overweight girls drops in early adolescence from 10.2% to around 6.4%, then
Discussion
Havighurst [1] classified the acquisition of a positive body image as one of the central developmental tasks of adolescence. In a cultural climate fostering both obesity with the availability of an abundance of high-calorie food and ideals of leanness and muscularity supported by media coverage of high-status role models, increasing numbers of adolescents are confronted with demands on their body shape that are hard to meet.
We studied a large, representative sample of Dutch young people, aged
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