Weight and place: A multilevel cross-sectional survey of area-level social disadvantage and overweight/obesity in Australia

Abstract

Objective: To estimate variation between small areas in adult body mass index (BMI), and assess the importance of area level socioeconomic disadvantage in predicting BMI. Methods: We identified all census collector districts (CCDs) in the 20 innermost Local Government Areas in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, and ranked them by the percentage of low income households (<$400/ week). In all, 50 CCDs were randomly selected from the least, middle and most disadvantaged septiles of the ranked list and 4913 residents (61.4% participation rate) completed one of two surveys. Multilevel linear regression was used to estimate area level variance in BMI and the importance of area level socioecono..