Vol. 2025 No. 4 (2025)
Articles

Differences in body surface area development among adolescents of 26 ethnic minorities

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  • Olivia Roberts,
  • Patricia Evans,
  • Dorothy Taylor
Olivia Roberts
University of California System, University of California Office of the President 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94607-5200, USA
Patricia Evans
University of California System, University of California Office of the President 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94607-5200, USA
Dorothy Taylor
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),6001 Executive Boulevard, MSC 9663, Bethesda, MD 20892-9663, USA

Published 18-09-2025

Keywords

  • ethnic minorities,
  • adolescents,
  • body surface area,
  • growth and development

Copyright (c) 2025 The Young Thinker's Review

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

[1]
O. Roberts, P. Evans, and D. Taylor, “Differences in body surface area development among adolescents of 26 ethnic minorities”, The Young Thinker's Rev., vol. 2025, no. 4, pp. 10–18, Sep. 2025, doi: 10.62852/ytr/2025/179.

Abstract

To examine differences in body surface area (BSA) development among adolescents from 26 ethnic minorities, stature and body-mass data for each sex were extracted from the 2010 Chinese National Survey on Students’ Constitution and Health. BSA was calculated with the Stevenson and DuBois equations. Thirty-six parameters—three indicators (stature, body mass, and BSA) across twelve age groups (7–18 years)—were subjected to factor analysis with varimax orthogonal rotation, converting the means of these parameters into factor scores. Using these factor scores, Q-type cluster analysis (Ward’s method) was conducted, grouping the 26 ethnic samples by sex, and Cub models were fitted to the BSA growth curves of the resulting clusters. Results showed that the three indicators effectively summarized inter-group developmental differences. Male samples formed four clusters and female samples five, which could be labeled as high-, intermediate-, and low-development groups, with significant between-group variation. BSA development was both similar and dissimilar across ethnicities.

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