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

西北大学博士候选人Lauren Slubowski在William Leonard博士的指导下，将探索暴力对城市青年健康结果的生物学和文化影响。暴力如何影响年轻人的压力？具体来说，可以归因于暴力的压力对儿童肥胖有什么影响？这些问题源于对环境、应激生理学和新陈代谢之间关系的生物学和文化理解。为了解决这些问题，Slubowski将与居住在芝加哥的低收入非裔美国青少年一起工作。她将进行深入访谈，并使用共识方法，以更好地了解青少年在社区中经历的压力源。利用这些信息，Slubowski将比较一些心理压力测量的结果，收集头发样本中的皮质醇激素水平，并测量基本的健康指标，包括饮食行为、活动水平、血压和体重指数（BMI）。该项目将阐明城市环境中年轻人的暴力、日常经历、压力和健康结果之间的关系。这些发现将扩大对西方人群健康和疾病的生物文化途径的理解，并涉及一个在人类学学科中研究不足的年龄组。此外，该项目更广泛地适用于公共卫生和健康差距问题。资助这个项目也有助于培养研究生。

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.