Musculoskeletal disorders affect humankind perhaps more than any other category of malady, and at all ages. Prominent amongst such disorders are those apparently afflicting the vertebral column presenting with symptoms of headache and neck pain. Diagnosis of the cause of symptoms implicating structures or dysfunction of the neck as source is fraught with difficulty. Local neck joint kinetic behaviour and motion amplitude commands attention from those with an interest in manipulation, like chiropractors and physiotherapists, as well as surgeons, who all commonly examine patients for an association between perceived anomalies of local joint motion and such symptoms.Anecdotal impressions about the significance of findings made in this fashion form the rationale for therapy, including manual therapy.Although there are data on global neck kinematics, studies of local neck joint kinematic behaviour in appropriate age and gender cohorts of sufficient size to be clinically useful are scarce and contradictory. Remarkably, as investigators seek, but have yet to find, reliable and accurate diagnostic tests to quantify local neck joint motion, surgeons also seek surgically without any such data to relieve spondylotic myelopathy and/or radiculopathy caused by mechanical pathology in an intervertebral disc in the cervical spine with insertion of artificial disc prostheses. Thus, for those addressing the causes of otherwise unexplained neck related symptoms, especially surgeons and chiropractors, accurate data and a thorough understanding of neck kinematics (understanding of joint behaviour without consideration of forces) are essential, but absent. This leads to six sets of values of sufficient size for each gender and three age ranges, accounting for inter-observer variation, which no previous study has undertaken in this way. Earlier reports of notional "normal" values for both motion amplitudes and ICR locations appear not to be based on equivalent data.This thesis reveals sufficient differences in values in enough joints for the three different age cohorts representing the commonest age groups presenting with neck pain and related disorders, and in both genders, to render current catalogues of normal motion somewhat unsatisfactory. For normal sagittal plane local joint motion from C2-3 to C6-7 in the human neck, for rotation amplitude values, the Null Hypotheses that no such data in neck kinematics can show differences in values from age cohort to age cohort and/or from gender cohort to gender cohort are rejected. The Null Hypotheses for Instantaneous Axes of Rotation are confirmed.Further, the thesis produces sufficient new evidence to propose more accurate ranges that can be considered as clinically relevant normals as the basis for investigations into clinical causes and assessment of treatment results for mechanically implicated neck pain and related disorders.4