Relationship between social deprivation and aspects of psychomotor performance in middle adolescence.

Though the depressed physical and nutritional status of the deprived groups in our society is historically well documented from both the imaginative (Dickens, 1854) and journalistic (Chadwick 1842) points of view, very few investigations of a scientific nature have been conducted in this area which include objective motor performance measures in their design; the bulk of the available research literature is concerned with socio-occupational or regional differences as related to body size, particularly with regard to difference in height and weight (Meredith, 1951; Clements and Pickett, 1952, 1954; Scottish Council for Research in Education, 1953; Clements, 1953). It is the intention of this paper to call attention to aspects of the psychomotor condition of impoverished children by considering whether a socially determined standard of nutritive deficiency is significantly related to aspects of this condition in addition to the characteristics of height and weight. As a subsidiary we are interested in assessing the differential contribution, if any, of these 'physical' variables to this relationship before and after certain 'environmental' variables are held constant. While it is true that poverty, reproductive failure, and inadequate nutrition are components of a synergistic interaction, each being mutually reinforcing elements in a complex network of influences associated with the 'disadvantaged', their adverse effects on physical growth and development are probably greatest when such growth would normally be maximal. Consequently one ofthe most productive periods for assessing whether a socially determined standard of nutritive deficiency is significantly related to the physical/motor characteristics of the individual is that stage of the development cycle, termed middle adolescence, wherein occurs the adolescent growth spurt (Tanner, 1962).