Week 7 Discussion 2:
This article “The impact of maternal prenatal smoking on the development of childhood overweight in school-aged children” by Wang et al. (2012) is a quantitative research article. It seeks to establish the link between maternal smoking occasions in one year before birth and overweight among school-going children.
Study Design:
Incorporating the method of a longitudinal cohort design, the study employed data collected from a sample of participants belonging to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD). The researchers examined the same group of children with the ages of birth, 1, 3, and 6 years old (Wang et al., 2012).
Research Question:
This research intended to assess the relationship between smoking in the year prior to conception and being overweight in school-age children and to observe the effects of smokers’ and offspring’s characteristics on the children’s weight.
Strengths:
- The study practiced a sample size of 1041 from a population-based cohort study conducted in China that included 406529 individuals (Wang et al., 2012).
- Regarding the health assessment instrument, policies were used to measure the height and weight of children using standard procedures.
- The longitudinal design enabled the researcher to track the mean of the scores of the same children over time, which helped establish whether maternal smoking had long-term impacts on childhood overweight.
Limitations:
- The study used self-reported data on smoking from the mothers, which was prone to recall bias or social desirability bias, as noted in a similar study by Wang et al. (2012).
- It failed data on genetic make-up, diet, and other-like screen time that could predispose childhood overweight.
- The problem pertaining to the sample in this study was that participants were voluntary; thus, self-selection bias might have affected it.
- Possible selection bias resulting from dropping out or incomplete data.
Generalizability:
The study’s results could be generalizable to other comparable populations in the United States since the data used in the current study were from a national cohort study. However, while generalizing the results of such studies and applying them to other populations, it is essential to take into consideration the demographic and cultural differences of the target population (Wang et al., 2012).
In conclusion, the study by Wang et al. (2012) is a quantitative longitudinal study. The authors demonstrated that maternal smoking within one year before birth increases the likelihood of the child being overweight at school age. However, there are some limitations to the study; first, the number of participants is vast; second, the measurement procedures used are highly standardized; and third, the nature of the design study is longitudinal. While the conclusions may hold in analogous societies in the US, further research is required to test the idea in other settings.
Reference:
Wang, L., Mamudu, H. M., & Wu, T. (2012). The impact of maternal prenatal smoking on the development of childhood overweight in school-aged children. Pediatric Obesity, 8(3), 178-188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2047-6310.2012.00103.x