An Analysis of Some Physical Features of Babies at Birth (A Case Study of Federal Medical Centre, Umuahia)

Abstract

New born baby is a gift from God and what a newborn baby looks like is not a baby model, rather a newborn baby looks varies from baby to baby in terms of weight, height and head circumferences. In this research, a sample of 200 male and female babies was used for the analysis. The aim is to identify if there is a significant difference between the means of the variables considered. In this research, three variables were considered for both male and female babies at birth. The result showed that the mean birth weight is 3.55kg and 3.39kg for male and female babies respectively. The mean height and head circumference of female babies recorded higher than their male counterpart. The Hoteling’s T2-test showed that there is a significant difference between the mean vectors of the variables considered; hence a discriminant analysis was conducted. The discriminant function obtained fairly classifies the group at 42% error rate. From the results gotten, there is significant difference between the height, weight and head circumference of male and female babies and conclude that male babies are heavier in terms of weight while female babies have bigger head circumference than the male babies.