STUDY OF BODY WEIGHT AND HEIGHT OF ADOLESCENTS FROM DIFFERENT ETHNIC GROUPS IN THE PLOVDIV REGION

Abstract

Purpose: To study the body weight and height of adolescents and to compare them with gender and age standards. All the children are from the Plovdiv region. Material and methods: About 185 children from three different ethnic groups have been studied. It also hase been developed and used specifically for this purpose an author's questionnaire for students, which contains open, closed, and mixed questions. Have been used descriptive statistics for quantitative (mean ± SD) and qualitative (percentage ± SEp) variables, also T-test for proving statistically significant differences between two independent samples. A p-value < 0.05 had been considered statistically significant for all tests. For the statistical processing, we have used the data analysis software IBM SPSS Statistics v. 25. Results: The study was conducted in the Plovdiv district in the period of May 2019 - July 2019. The subject of the study has been 185 adolescents from different ethnic groups. The logical units of the study were schools in Plovdiv and the village of Karadzhovo, which is part of the Plovdiv municipality. The gender distribution is 101 (56.6%) boys and 84 (45.4%) girls. The study covered mainly 96 Bulgarian children (51.89% ± 3.67), followed by 30 Turkish (16.22% ± 2.71) and 59 Roma origin (31.89% ± 3.43). The group of adolescents has been included students aged 11 – 15 years old. In the group of 11-year-olds, 61 (32.97%) Bulgarian children usually play sports out of school, followed by 29 (15.67%) Roma and 16 (8.65%) Turkish children. We have proved statistically significant differences between mean weight, measured in our sample compared to the population standard for the age of 11 years old boys (n=28, 45.84±13.42 kg vs n=134, 39.74±7.15 kg; t-test=2.34, p=0.026) and girls (n=35, 45.49±10.46 kg vs n=135, 41.60±9.03 kg; t-test=2.24, p=0.029), respectively. The height measured for both genders in this age group had not been statistically significantly different compared to the standard. No other differences between sample point estimates and population standard had been obtained by age groups and gender. Conclusion: For the age of 11-12 years old children, higher body weight had been found in the Bulgarian boys. The girls with the average highest values had been of Turkish origin.