NCJ Number
225587
Journal
Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 53 Issue: 6 Dated: November 2008 Pages: 1273-1279
Date Published
November 2008
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This study reviewed data from the five studies in the literature on facial soft-tissue depth for subadults (1-18 years old), with the effect of age being the primary interest, since differing soft-tissue depths according to age have the potential to surpass the magnitude of measurement error.
Abstract
The analysis of data from this review found that for subjects from 1 to 18 years old, most soft-tissue depth measurements increased by less than 3 mm. These results suggest that dividing the data for children into more than two age groups is unlikely to provide many advantages. Therefore, data were split into two groups, with the division point corresponding to the midpoint of the observed trends and main data density (0-11 and 12-18 years old; division point at 11.5 years). Published sub-adult data for nine additional studies that reported broader age groups were pooled with the aforementioned data to produce the final tallied soft-tissue-depth tables. These tables have the advantages of increased sample sizes (pogonion has greater than 1,770 individuals for either age group) and increased levels of certainty, since random and opposing systematic errors specific to each independent study should average out when the data are combined. Studies that report on soft-tissue depth measurements on sub-adults (18 years old and younger) were identified from literature searches conducted using Medline (Silverplatter), Current Contents, and traditional methods (reference lists of other article). These searches produced five studies that reported mean values for sub-adults at single integer age groups (4-8). An additional nine studies classified sub adults according to broader age ranges (9-17). 3 tables, 2 figures, and 26 references