Doctoral Dissertation Research: Violence, stress, and obesity among urban youth in the US

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Northwestern University doctoral candidate Lauren Slubowski, supervised by Dr. William Leonard, will explore the biological and cultural impacts of violence upon the health outcomes of urban youth. How does violence impact stress in young people? Specifically, what effect does the stress that can be attributed to violence have on childhood obesity? These questions stem from biological and cultural understandings of the relationship between the environment, stress physiology, and metabolism. To address these questions, Slubowski will work with a population of low-income, African American adolescents who live in Chicago. She will conduct in-depth interviews and use consensus methods to gain a better understanding of the stressors that youth experience in their neighborhood. Using this information, Slubowski will compare outcomes in a number of psychological stress measures, collect cortisol hormone levels in hair samples, and measure basic health indicators, including eating behavior, activity level, blood pressure, and body mass index (BMI). This project will illuminate the pathways between violence, everyday experience, stress, and health outcomes among young people in an urban environment. The findings will expand understandings of biocultural pathways to health and disease in a Western population, and involve an age bracket that is understudied in the discipline of anthropology. Further, this project has wider applicability to public health and the topic of health disparities. Funding this project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.