No abstract

Recent studies of the effects of socioeconomic stratification on stature and age at menarche in Poland are reviewed. The data are derived from a survey of conscripts in 1976, three nationwide growth surveys in 1955, 1966, and 1978, and several surveys of the timing of menarche. The data indicate a clear social gradient in stature during childhood, youth, and young adulthood, and in the age at menarche. Individuals from the larger urban centers and small families with college-educated fathers, on the average, tend to be the tallest and to mature earliest, while those from peasant (farmers) families are at the opposite extreme in size and maturity. Also, the data show marked secular trends towards increased stature and earlier maturation. The influence of social variables underlying the socioeconomic stratification, i.e., income, family size, education, occupational status, and urbanization, are discussed relative to their effects on growth and maturation of Polish children.Since the first surveys of the statures of children and military conscripts and of menarcheal age were undertaken in Western Europe in the first half of the 19th century, it has been recognized that growth data provide a good indicator of the degree of social and economic deficits suffered by the underprivileged strata in a society. Indeed, it was exactly the increasing awareness of such neglect, particularly the awareness of the dreadful condition of the working class in early 19th century Europe, that provided the main impulse for undertaking the first modern growth studies in the 1830s by Stanway, Horner, and Roberton in England, and by Villerme in France (Tanner, 1981).Although present-day industrial societies of Europe and United States are considerably different from those of 150 years ago, socioeconomic stratification is still reflected in the growth and maturation of children and youth in many such societies. Children from upper social strata, whether defined in terms of income, education, or occupational status, generally tend to be taller than their peers from lower strata at all ages, and tend to mature earlier and experience the adolescent growth spurt earlier (cf, Eveleth and Tanner, 1976). There are of course exceptions, for example, in Sweden (Lindgren, 1976(Lindgren, , 1981 and the United States (Hamill et al., 1972; MacMahon, 1973) social class differences in growth and maturation are negligible. Because the timing of the adolescent growth spurt generally varies by social class, social class differences in stature are greatest during adolescence. After adolescence, the differences are less, but usually do not disappear. A detailed analysis of the age-associated reduction of social class differences in the stature of Polish conscripts measured in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century was provided by Czekanowski (1930). The data also demonstrated marked statural differences between conscripts from gentry families and those of peasant stock, the former being significantly taller. ...

Relationships among ages at attaining 17 or 21 indices of maturity were considered in a longitudinal sample of 177 Polish boys examined at annual intervals from 1961 to 1972. Maturity indicators included ages at peak velocity for stature, sitting height, leg length and weight; ages at attaining 80%, 90%, 95% and 99% of adult stature; ages at attaining the median skeletal maturity scores (TW-2) characteristic of chronological ages 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 years; and ages at attaining stages II and IV of genital and public hair development. Age at initiation of the stature spurt (take-off) and ages at eruption of 14, 20 and 26 permanent teeth were ascertained for only 111 boys. All intercorrelations among the developmental indicators were positive. Ordering the correlation matrix gave three clusters: (1) a large central group including age at take-off and ages at all peak velocities, at genital and pubic hair stages II and IV, at attaining 90%, 95% and 99% of adult stature, and at the later stages of skeletal maturity; (2) indices of the tempo of maturation during prepubertal and/or early pubertal stages; and (3) ages at attaining a given number of permanent teeth. Results of a principal components analysis of the ages indicated two principal components, the first accounting for about 77% of the sample variance and the second for about 12%. The first principal component is apparently a general maturity factor, while the second apparently relates to the rate of skeletal maturity during pre-adolescence.

In a sample of approx. 19 000 Polish schoolgirls from the three largest cities of the Upper Silesia conurbation, menarcheal age was studied in relation to parental education (four levels) and father's occupation (12 groups). Menarcheal age tends to increase with decreasing parental education, although the gradient is not steep. When families below a certain level of economic standing are discarded from the best-educated and the least-well-educated groups, mean menarcheal age, surprisingly, decreases much more in the former than in the latter. Mean menarcheal ages for girls from different occupational groups range from 12.82 to 13.30 years and form the following sequence, in increasing order: managers--police--non-technical professionals--engineers, technicians and foremen--skilled industrial workers and small businessmen--unskilled workers--coal-miners. Mean menarcheal age for an occupational group is strongly dependent upon the group's socio-economic status, the latter being defined in terms of parental education, family income, family size, and dwelling conditions. However, daughters of men in the police force mature significantly earlier, and daughters of coal-miners significantly later, than would be expected from each group's rank in socio-economic status. The findings are compared with the results of other recent studies of social gradients in menarcheal age in Poland.

The trend of body size and stature increase within the Polish population, although decelerating, remained positive and steady during the last 45 years. No significant impact of the past half-century's socioeconomic crises was observed in these measures of growth. We concluded that during the economic crises some effective mechanism protecting the living conditions of the children and youth were operating within the population.