An Anthropometric Study of Edinburgh

In Part I of this paper (Provis and Ellis, 1955), a description was given of the measurements of more than 1,700 Edinburgh schoolchildren in 1952-53, these children being a stratified sample of the whole school population. Tables 1 and 2 in that paper summarized the various measurements and indices according to age group and sex, and Figs. 1 to 4 illustrated the age-group means for three linear measurements and two measures of width. Though group means do not describe the individual child's increments or growth pattern with age, the group means together with the variability of measurements of the individual children in each group give an indication of the range of 'normal' measurements at different ages. It seems worth while, therefore, to make some comments on the points of special interest in the measurements of Edinburgh children, especially as cross-sectional surveys of British schoolchildren have in the main been limited to measurement of height and weight, and very few data on body widths or on head measurements are available. The results which were tabulated in Tables 1 and 2 in Part I are discussed in more detail in the paragraphs which follow, and some additional diagrams are given, these being numbered Figs. 5 to 9 to form a sequence with the diagrams shown in Part I.