A bureau of child hygiene; co-operative studies and experiments by the Deparment of health of the city of New York and the Bureau of municipal research.

  • New York (N.Y.). Department of Health.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A bureau of child hygiene; co-operative studies and experiments by the Deparment of health of the city of New York and the Bureau of municipal research. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    I Hove the work of the department's inspectors in this respect, several tests were applied. For the two largest boroughs, Manhattan and Brooklyn, a chart was made showing for the period Sept. 1. 1007 to Jan. 31, 1908, the total examinations by each inspector and the number and percentage reported by him to ho defective. The results showed among inspectors a wide variation in percentages found defective, from 100% to 32', in Manhattan, and from 100% to 18% in Brooklyn (Dia- grams 1 and 2; Supplementary Tables 1 and 2). Of this varia- tion a part was, of course, attributable to actual differences among the children examined. That such differences could be so great, however, was hardly to be believed. The next step, therefore, was to select certain schools where more than one inspector had made examinations during the period. It was assumed that conditions in each school are nearly uniform, and that therefore any considerable variations in reports must be due to variations in the inspectors' methods. A chart similar to the former was drawn (Diagram 3; Supple- mentary Table 3), from which it appeared that discrepancies as great as between 32% and 92% and between 43% and 84% occurred in the same schools. In other words, two inspectors examining- different children in the same school reported re- sults differing by 100%. Not only in the total number of children needing treat- ment, hut in the kind of defects found is there room for varia- tion, some inspectors tending to find one or two particular de- fects, other inspectors to find oilier defects. To discover the extenl to which this might be the case, one hundred consecu- tive eanls were taken at random from the file of each in- spector ami a chart was prepared shoAving for each inspector the number of instances reported of each kind of defect (Dia- gram l: Supplementary Table 4). .As may he observed, some inspectors found a few instances of many defects, some found many instances of a few defects, while others found instances in abundance of the whole list of defects. 12