Physical Growth from Birth to Maturity

Abstract

RESEARCH on physical growth has been varied during the interval since the last review, but three major trends deserve mention. First, in exploring developmental aspects of growth there has been a continued emphasis upon longitudinal investigations of the same children thru time. This plan of research makes possible studies of individual variation in rate of development, and for a given sample size yields smaller standard errors for growth increment means than does the cross-sectional approach. Sample shrinkage, a major practical problem in longitudinal research, has been dealt with by workers at the Brush Foundation (63) by adding cases as needed and analyzing the data in terms of overlapping age groups arranged so as to permit splicing together the results for different stages of development. Second, there has been an emphasis upon the investigation of patterns of morphological variation among individuals, and of the relationships between physique, temperament, disease, and physical capacity. Interesting in this connection is the application of factor analysis to sets of anthropometric intercorrelations in an attempt to define mathematically the dimensions of growth and physical differentiation. Third, there has been an emphasis upon the integration of research findings from various sources. The last three years have perhaps produced fewer reports than heretofore on major investigations, but have been noteworthy for several comprehensive reviews including both published and unpublished findings on special topics (e.g., 15, 35, 37, 67, 73). These contributions have colligated and evaluated an extensive and scattered literature which the nonspecialist finds it difficult to correlate, owing to innumerable variations from study to study in sampling procedures and statistical treatments. However, these reviews suggest that much research effort would have been more productive had samples been more adequately selected and defined, and had anthropometric technics been applied in a more standardized fashion.