ABSTRACT
Youth overweight and obesity (OWOB) surveillance often uses body mass index (BMI) derived from self-reported height and weight, but these measures can suffer from high proportions of missing data. Complete case analysis (CCA) is the most common approach to handle missing data, but this approach can introduce bias if missing data are not missing completely at random. Using BMI and related covariate data from 36,546 female and 37,126 male youth aged 12–19 years who participated in the COMPASS study in 2018/19, where approximately 30% of BMI data were missing, results and inference were compared between CCA and multiple imputation (MI) approaches to examine associations with youth BMI. Results of regression joint models showed contrasting findings between MI and CCA, highlighting that appropriate methodological choices in the handling of missing data are essential in youth OWOB research and that choices can impact research inference and thereby associated policy and programming recommendations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2024.2368345
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Amanda Doggett
Amanda Doggett research focuses on the epidemiology of health behaviours, primarily substance use. She has a particular interest in the methodological aspects of research studies, including the impacts of missing data.
Ashok Chaurasia
Ashok Chaurasia is an assistant professor within the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. His research interests pertain to innovative application of statistical methods in health research, including application of existing statistical methods or development of (new) analytical (statistical) tools as warranted by the health research topic.
Jean-Philippe Chaput
Jean-Philippe Chaput is a senior scientist with the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the CHEO Research Institute, whose research focuses on health promotion and the prevention of chronic diseases.
Scott T. Leatherdale
Scott Leatherdale is a professor within the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on advancing a systems approach to primary prevention activities, evaluating population-level health interventions across multiple risk factor domains, and creating research infrastructure to facilitate large population studies in chronic disease prevention.