Tall claims? Re-evaluating the empirical foundations of anthropometric history

The purpose of the proposed project is to contribute some “methodological housekeeping” to anthropometric history.

This will be done by re-evaluating the empirical basis for some of the most well-known and puzzling results of the literature, and through critical tests of methods applied.It has gradually become common practice in anthropometric history to draw general conclusions based on results on a selected sample, e.g. data on recruited soldiers.

A fundamental question for the literature is therefore: how severe can selection biases be?

The question has come to the forefront after a series of critical papers based on a theoretical model and a meta-analysis of previous results.Swedish data provides a unique opportunity to provide the first direct empirical test of this issue because there are records available on both recruited soldiers (selected sample) and from (for men) universal conscript inspections (representative sample).I will process and analyze data on recruited soldiers from the Centrala Soldatregistret and published statistics from the inspections of conscripts in Sweden 1840–2000.The results from this project will be extremely important for our reading of previous results as well as for future research using data on heights for both historical and present-day populations.

If the results from my small pilot study holds—that results from selected samples tell us little about the underlying population—the results would also be highly controversial and contested.