# Environments, Preferences and Childhood Obesity: Evidence From a Natural Experiment

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA · 2020 · $884,788

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
 Child and adolescent obesity continue to be serious public health challenges of the 21st century. Recently,
the role of the built- and policy (B&P) environments in contributing to diet, activity and BMI has received
significant attention. But, evaluating these relationships is challenging due to concerns about selection and
heterogeneity. Individuals select neighborhoods based on preferences towards health and other factors, which
may bias estimates. Because random assignment is infeasible, experts have called for natural- and quasi-
experimental methods that leverage exogenous variation. Moreover, environments may not affect all
individuals equally and can average out to small or null effects, yielding misleading conclusions. Such
heterogeneity has thus far only been examined by demographic characteristics. However, evidence on
environments’ effects is mixed even within these subgroups, suggesting that other factors may be at work. An
emerging literature suggests that time-and risk (T&R) preferences (e.g. future-orientation and risk-aversion)
may play such a role. T&R preferences vary considerably and have been linked with health behaviors.
Therefore, it is possible that individuals who vary in their future-orientation and risk-aversion are differentially
impacted by the B&P environment. However, to our knowledge, this has not been examined empirically.
Adolescents represent a key subpopulation in which to study these issues; their obesity rates have quadrupled
during the past thirty years, and their T&R preferences, health behaviors, and interactions with the B&P
environment are evolving towards independence, making this a critical time for interventions. Our goal is to
exploit a rare opportunity to estimate the effects of B&P environments on obesogenic
behaviors and outcomes among adolescents while addressing selection and heterogeneity. We
propose to expand our NIH-funded Military Teenagers’ Environment, Exercise, and Nutrition Study (M-
TEENS), which leveraged a natural experiment due to the compulsory (re)location of Army families. M-TEENS
collected up to 3 waves of data on diet, activity and BMI from 1519 12-13 year old children in Army families.
Our proposed extension will collect 2 additional waves of data (2017 & 2018), yielding a 5-year longitudinal
panel with rarely-available exogenous within-child changes in the B&P environment. A novel contribution of
the proposed study is the examination of whether the environment’s effects vary by adolescents’ and their
parents’ T&R preferences. This is a time-sensitive application; our cohort will complete high-school at the
end of the proposed data collection, making their relocations and, therefore environments, less exogenous
thereafter. This study is likely to have a high impact because it addresses a highly significant health issue,
combines a natural experiment study design with longitudinal data, and is highly innovative in its focus on the
role of adolescents’ and parents...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9903282
- **Project number:** 5R01DK111169-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
- **Principal Investigator:** ASHLESHA DATAR
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $884,788
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-04-01 → 2023-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9903282

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9903282, Environments, Preferences and Childhood Obesity: Evidence From a Natural Experiment (5R01DK111169-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9903282. Licensed CC0.

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