Schneiderman Emet D, Kowalski Charles J, Have Thomas R Ten
Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Baylor College of Dentistry, Dallas, Texas, 75246.
Department of Oral Biology, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109.
Am J Hum Biol. 1990;2(5):475-490. doi: 10.1002/ajhb.1310020504.
Tracking can be defined as the tendency of individuals or collections of individuals to stay within a particular course of growth over time relative to other individuals. Thus, tracking describes stability in growth patterns. This paper outlines a statistical procedure for examining tracking in a single sample of measurements made on humans or other animals. This nonparametric procedure, based on Cohen's (1960) kappa statistic, is suitable for equally or unequally spaced serial data that is complete and is appropriate for questions concerning growth as well as other time-dependent phenomena. It is a conceptually simple longitudinal method that affords insight regarding the predictability of growth within a population. For example, by tracking, one can ask if young children who are in the lowest height for age category are likely to end up in that category at an older age. A user-friendly GAUSS program is provided that generates overall as well as individual and track-specific statistics. High-resolution graphic representations of the data are also generated by the program. Examples are presented, including a tracking analysis of Guatemalan Indian children using quartiles.
追踪可以定义为个体或个体集合相对于其他个体随着时间推移在特定生长轨迹上保持的趋势。因此，追踪描述了生长模式的稳定性。本文概述了一种统计程序，用于检验对人类或其他动物进行的单次测量样本中的追踪情况。这种基于科恩（1960年）卡帕统计量的非参数程序，适用于完整的等距或不等距序列数据，适用于有关生长以及其他随时间变化现象的问题。它是一种概念上简单的纵向方法，能洞察群体内生长的可预测性。例如，通过追踪，可以询问年龄别身高处于最低类别的幼儿在年长时是否仍可能处于该类别。提供了一个用户友好的GAUSS程序，该程序生成总体以及个体和特定追踪统计数据。该程序还会生成数据的高分辨率图形表示。文中给出了示例，包括使用四分位数对危地马拉印第安儿童进行的追踪分析。
