Surveillance of growth as a measurement of health in the community.

The initial objectives of this study are the establishment of baseline standards of height for children aged 5 to 11 years and the assessment of the effect of various social factors on these standards. Every year in England and Scotland measurements of height weight triceps skinfold thickness and peak expiratory flow rate are taken from 10000 primary schoolchildren by local nurses and health visitors. Parents complete questionnaires regarding their socioeconomic status their childrens health and their own height plus some aspect of their childs nutrition (school meals and milk intake). The relationship between attained height and each of the six social strata is shown in Table 1. For all social classes. Scottish children were found to be shorter than English children. Analysis of variance on the English data indicated that social class and number of siblings interacted significantly (p > 0.0001) suggesting that the effect of sibship size on the height of the child depended on social class (it had a consistent effect on the manual social strata). In Scotland the effect of sibship size was observed in both manual and nonmanual social groups. Other findings showed that: 1) with each social class children with unemployed fathers were shorter; 2) in Scotland a relationship was observed between income and attained height; and 3) fathers education had no significant effect on height of the child although there was a slight tendency for children whose fathers had higher educational levels to be taller. This study shows that social class employment status of fathers and sibship size effect the attained height of children.