Height, Chest Size, and Household Composition in Late-Nineteenth-Century Catalonia

Abstract

This article measures the impact of early-life household composition on adult height and chest size in men born in Catalonia in the late nineteenth century. It combines data from military drafts with census records, observing the same individual twice over his lifetime. For family composition characteristics I control for the number of siblings, intergenesic interval, parental occupation and educational level, fatherless or motherless families, and other relatives living in the household. I show that taller individuals were more likely to come from well-off families and that men who grew up in orphanages or in motherless households were shorter than their counterparts. Results also uncover that there was a negative association between height and the number of siblings and the age gap between them. However, this negative association is driven by having more brothers (instead of sisters). If we are to gain a fuller understanding of the factors that have influenced height, we need to consider the composition of the household as an explanatory variable.

Sibship Size, Height and Cohort Selection: A Methodological Approach

“…By exploring the relationship between family size and birth order to height, similar conclusions were obtained for the cohorts of Dutch conscripts born between 1944 and 1947 [18], and for Swiss recruits born between 1951 and 1983 [19]. In southern Europe, a number of studies also confirm this negative relationship between the number of siblings in a family and the physical stature of their drafted members [20,21]. Finally, in the same vein, in southeastern Minnesota, sibship size was found to have had a strong influence on the height of children born throughout the first two decades of the 20th century [22].…”

“…They include, for example, the works of R.E. Bailey, T.J. Hatton & K. Inwood [12] (see also [13]) for England and Wales, E. Roberts & J.R. Warren [22] for the American city of Saint Paul (Minnesota), R. Ramon-Muñoz & J.-M. Ramon-Muñoz [25] for the case of Igualada, an industrial town in central Catalonia and G. Galofré-Vilà [21] for the northeastern Catalan city of Girona. However, although all these authors followed a similar general approach, there are also some methodological differences among them when linking individual anthropometric data with household and family data (see Table 1).…”