The effect of obesity on the physical self-concept of urban school children living in Potchefstroomareas of South Africa

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of obesity on the physical self-concept of urban school children living in Potchefstroom,South Africa. A total of 277 (127 boys and 150 girls) children aged 11-13 years from urban schools in Potchefstroom voluntarily participated in cross-sectional, observational research study conducted in 2007. Stature and body mass were measured according to the International Society forAdvancement of Kinanthropomet ry (ISAK). The children were classi fied into three groups of normal, overweight and obese according to BMI cut-offpoint suggested by Cole, Bellizzi , Flegal and Dietz (2000). Susan Harter’s Self-Perception Profile for Adolescents was used to assess the self-percept ion of children. Descriptive statist ics of means and standard deviations as well as frequencies were calculated for the data. Nonparametric t-test wasemployed to test significant di fferences between boys and girls among the three groups. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey post -hoc test werecalculated to examine the effect of obesity on the children’s physical self-concept. The results showed that overweight and obese children were tal ler and heavier than their normal counterparts. Furthermore, the resul ts showed that the overweight or obesity status significantly affected boys physical acceptance (F7.02 =2.62,