Throwing out the baby with the bathwater?: Comparing 2 approaches to implausible values of change in body size.
BACKGROUND: In childhood obesity research, the appearance of height loss, or "shrinkage," indicates measurement error. It is unclear whether a common response--excluding "shrinkers" from analysis--reduces bias. METHODS: Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we sampled 816 female adolescents (≥17 years) who had attained adult height by 1996 and for whom adult height was consistently measured in 2001 and 2008 ("gold-standard" height). We estimated adolescent obesity prevalence and the association of maternal education with adolescent obesity under 3 conditions: excluding shrinkers (for whom gold-standard height was less than recorded height in 1996), retaining shrinkers, and retaining shrinkers but substituting their gold-standard height. RESULTS: When we estimated obesity prevalence, excluding shrinkers decreased precision without improving validity. When we regressed obesity on maternal education, excluding shrinkers produced less valid and less precise estimates. CONCLUSION: In some circumstances, ignoring shrinkage is a better strategy than excluding shrinkers.
Duke Scholars
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- Weight Loss
- United States
- Research Design
- Reproducibility of Results
- Obesity
- Longitudinal Studies
- Humans
- Female
- Epidemiology
- Data Interpretation, Statistical
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Location
Related Subject Headings
- Weight Loss
- United States
- Research Design
- Reproducibility of Results
- Obesity
- Longitudinal Studies
- Humans
- Female
- Epidemiology
- Data Interpretation, Statistical