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Urbanization , Fast-food Restaurants , and Individual Agency : An Ecological and Life Course Analysis of Body Weight Changes in Chinese Youth *

The conventional trickle-down model of community effects on body weight status is theoretically flawed. A better understanding of the association between community contextual effects and youth‟s body weight status is needed to improve the existing theory and inform public health policy. We propose to integrate an ecological approach with a life course perspective and introduce human agency and its dynamic interactions with contextual factors into our model. Drawing upon longitudinal and multilevel data, we study body weight changes captured by both general and central obesity measures in Chinese youth. We employ a difference-in-difference model to adjust for “pretreatment heterogeneity bias.” We examine three dimensions of individual agency, including family resources, health knowledge, and selfperceived body shape, and their interactions with two important community factors, urbanization and fast-food restaurants, thereby adjusting for “treatment effect heterogeneity bias.” Our preliminary results highlight complex patterns of body weight change as Chinese youth transitioned from early childhood to late adolescence.