{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0242681","title":"First-year college students’ weight change is influenced by their randomly assigned roommates’ BMI","abstract":"BACKGROUND: There is ongoing debate about whether friends' greater similarity in Body Mass Index (BMI) than non-friends is due to friend selection, shared environments, or peer influence. METHODS: First-year college students (n = 104) from a southwestern U.S. university were randomly assigned roommates during the university's housing process, effectively removing friend selection effects. Participant BMI was measured up to four times (T1-T4) across 2015-2016. The influence of roommate baseline BMI (T1) on change in participant BMI over time (T2-T4) was analyzed using a linear mixed effects model adjusted for individual socio-demographics, linear time trends, baseline BMI, and physical clustering of students. A sensitivity analysis examining floormates was also conducted. RESULTS: Consistent with roommate influence, participants randomized to roommates with a higher BMI gained more weight between times T2 and T4 (β = 0.06; 95% CI = 0.02, 0.10). No shared environment effects (shared campus or floor) were found. CONCLUSIONS: Randomly assigned roommates influenced each other's weight trajectories. This clarifies that BMI convergence can occur outside of friend selection or shared environments mechanisms.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2020,"id":110713,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9447,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":62526,"name":"Daniel J. Hruschka","orcid":"0000-0003-2188-7782","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":513000,"name":"Alexandra Brewis","orcid":"0000-0003-3769-4205","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":378538,"name":"David R. Schaefer","orcid":"0000-0001-9038-0251","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385430,"name":"Meg Bruening","orcid":"0000-0002-8301-8040","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":512999,"name":"Irene van Woerden","orcid":"0000-0001-6339-5335","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":83,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:13:01.914939Z","pmid":"33232356","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}