4.6 Article

Crowdsourcing Novel Childhood Predictors of Adult Obesity

Journal

PLOS ONE
Volume 9, Issue 2, Pages -

Publisher

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0087756

Keywords

-

Funding

  1. Salwe Research Program for Mind and Body (Tekes - Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) [1104/10]
  2. NSF-PECASE [0953837]
  3. DARPA [W911NF-1-11-0076, FA8650-11-1-7155]
  4. endowed chair at Cornell University
  5. NSF IGERT program at UVM [1144388]
  6. Direct For Education and Human Resources
  7. Division Of Graduate Education [1144388] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
  8. Directorate For Engineering
  9. Div Of Electrical, Commun & Cyber Sys [1254549] Funding Source: National Science Foundation

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Effective and simple screening tools are needed to detect behaviors that are established early in life and have a significant influence on weight gain later in life. Crowdsourcing could be a novel and potentially useful tool to assess childhood predictors of adult obesity. This exploratory study examined whether crowdsourcing could generate well-documented predictors in obesity research and, moreover, whether new directions for future research could be uncovered. Participants were recruited through social media to a question-generation website, on which they answered questions and were able to pose new questions that they thought could predict obesity. During the two weeks of data collection, 532 participants (62% female; age = 26.5 +/- 6.7; BMI = 29.0 +/- 7.0) registered on the website and suggested a total of 56 unique questions. Nineteen of these questions correlated with body mass index (BMI) and covered several themes identified by prior research, such as parenting styles and healthy lifestyle. More importantly, participants were able to identify potential determinants that were related to a lower BMI, but have not been the subject of extensive research, such as parents packing their children's lunch to school or talking to them about nutrition. The findings indicate that crowdsourcing can reproduce already existing hypotheses and also generate ideas that are less well documented. The crowdsourced predictors discovered in this study emphasize the importance of family interventions to fight obesity. The questions generated by participants also suggest new ways to express known predictors.

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