Single-sex vs. coed education: can schooling type affect over- and underweight health risks?

ABSTRACT

This study shows that adolescents’ weight-related health risks can depend on the type of school attended: single-sex vs. coed. Our analyses of a 14-year survey of over 478,000 middle school students in South Korea, conducted from 2005 to 2019, indicate that while single-sex school attendance may increase the risk of being overweight, it also decreases the risk of being underweight compared to coed school attendance. We further confirmed that non-overweight girls in single-sex schools are less likely to engage in weight-loss efforts or participate in the unhealthy weight-loss methods such as having fewer meals and monotrophic diet. These findings imply that the coed and single-sex schools should adopt different approaches to improving their students’ weight-related health conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Single-sex schooling
• weight-loss behavior
• gender peer effects
• school formation

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I20
• I12
• I28

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The KYRBS survey does not include information on weight-loss methods for 2018. For details on the KYRBS data, see notes to Table A 2 and Kim et al. (2016).

² The education offices often consider students’ school preference or home-to-school distance.

³ According to Kim et al. (2016), in the self-reported KYRBS middle-school data, weight was under-reported by 1.7 kg (1.1 kg) for boys (girls), and height was under-reported (over-reported) by 1.3 cm (0.5 cm) for boys (girls). In an alternative analysis given in Table A4, we adjusted students’ weight and height in line with the sizes of over- and under-reporting and confirmed that the main results were maintained.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A5A2A01047073). It was also supported by NRF(National Research Foundation of Korea) Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2019-Global Ph.D. Fellowship Program) and the Sogang University Research Grant of 2021 (Grant #202112018.01).