Table 1.

National Public Opinion Studies of Americans’ Attributions of Blame and Responsibility for Obesity in the United States, 2004-2012

	Blame	Responsibility
	Lusk and	Evans	Research!	Barry	AP/
	Ellison 201340,a	et al. 200516,b	America 200638,c	et al. 20137,d	NORC 201239e
	n = 774	n = 1,047	n = 800	n = 404	n = 1,011
Data collection time frame	Mar 2011	Jan-Mar 2004	Sep 2006	May-June 2012	Nov-Dec 2012
Questions focused on childhood obesity	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
Parents	59%	91%	87%	95%	87%
Individuals	80%	—	84%	—	88%
Children	—	39%	—	61%	—
Schools	—	30%	43%	53%	50%
Health care providers	—	27%	37%	—	57%
Food and beverage industry	35%	32%	47%	50%	53%
Government	18%	17%	20%	42%	23%f

^aPercentage of respondents who believe that the following are primarily to blame for the rise in obesity.

^bPercentage of respondents who “believe that the following have ‘a lot of responsibility’ to reduce childhood obesity.”

^cPercentage of respondents who answered “a lot” to the question, “How much responsibility does each of the following have in helping address the issue of obesity?”

^dPercentage of respondents in the control group of an experimental survey who answered 5 to 7 on a 7-point scale from “hardly any responsibility” to “a great deal of responsibility” for addressing the problem of childhood obesity.

^ePercentage of respondents who assigned a “large” or “very large” amount of responsibility to the following groups for solving the country's obesity problems.

^fThe average of the federal and state government, questioned separately.