The apparently closed societies of the New Guinea Highlands were traditionally in possession of quite large quantities of pearl shells traded from the coast. Since these constituted almost the only category of goods not produced as easily in the Highlands as the lowlands, and since they formed an appreciable component of the bride wealth, they suggest directional mating leading to an outward movement of women from the Highlands. Marriage movement in three samples of women confirms this suggestion.

The development of the Olympic Games is reviewed. The factors which contribute towards success in sport at international level and the achievements and influences of different countries are discussed. The effect of commercial sponsorship on international sporting events is outlined.

The fifty states of the US were compared in 1971–72 and 1974–75 with respect to percentage apparent conceptions aborted and infant mortality rates attributed to various causes. Only non-vehicle accidental deaths were consistently related to abortion. The correlation is non-linear; non-vehicle accidental deaths were especially high in states with little or no abortion. A decline in non-vehicle accidental deaths from before to after the Supreme Court decision was most pronounced in states where there were fewest abortions before the decision and where increases in abortion occurred following the decision.

I should like to discuss both the demographic and public health implications of the matters which have arisen at this meeting.

There are clearly some areas of consensus: we all agree that lactation is of fundamental importance, and that the birth interval is important, both for the health of the mother and child and with regard to fertility. Obviously, the longer the birth interval, the fewer births a woman will have during her reproductive life. A number of schemes were presented yesterday to show that in traditional societies with very long birth intervals there will be a reduced total fertility.

Despite the absence of a family planning programme, the prevalence of sterilisation in Brazil has increased substantially, such that it is used by relatively young women in poor areas of the country. Sterilisation is influenced more by the characteristics of the health service than by socioeconomic characteristics of the population.

Man's ability to perform his daily round of work is a complex matter and depends upon an optimal function of numerous organs and their integration. Intellectual ability, motivation and emotional stability play a great, and sometimes decisive, role in work performances.

It is possible to summarize our survey under the following four headings:

1. Members of different ethnic groups may react differently to comparable natural (usually complex) situations.

2. Laboratory measurements of various sensory functions of ethnic groups have often been contradictory; and even though some peripheral differences in perception are a priori probable, others may still be caused by cultural differences in cognition, memory content or motivation; these cognitive and memory differences may be best interpreted as differences in individually acquired but group characteristic reafference systems.

Reported information on the duration of post-partum amenorrhoea usually shows considerable number preference, particularly at 6-monthly intervals. This paper presents a technique for smoothing such amenorrhoea data using a modified exponential curve. An attempt has also been made to estimate the average number of months a mother is expected to remain amenorrhoeic.

Differences in age at marriage, fertility and contraceptive use are related to religious background, individual educational level and community level education. In general, the effects of community education are weak compared to individual level of education, but differences exist between Hindus and Roman Catholics.

Worldwide data indicate a growing number of energy homeostasis disorders, which are especially dangerous in childhood. The distribution and growing trends of overweight and obesity in children have been widely investigated, unlike the prevalence of too-low body weight and its determinants. This study aimed to estimate the frequency of body mass deficiency in Polish rural girls and differences among four Polish regions – Choszczno and Leszno in the north-west, and Ostrów Mazowiecka and Suwałki in the north-east. Data were taken from 7764 rural girls aged 9–18 years examined in 1987, when the country was in economic crisis, and 9431 such girls examined in 2001, when the country was undergoing political transformation. The frequency of weight deficiency was estimated based on BMI by applying the international standards of Cole. An Extent of Overweight (EOW) index was used to create an Extent of Thinness (EOT) index. A significant increase in weight deficiency was found in the rural girls – from 7.5% in 1987 to 8.9% in 2001 – and an increase in the EOT index from 0.37 in 1987 to 0.43 in 2001. Analysis by area of residence demonstrated significant differentiation. In the regions in north-west Poland, mainly inhabited by non-farming families, the prevalence of weight deficiency in girls almost doubled from 1987 to 2001, probably because of the mass and long-term unemployment that resulted from the closure of state farms in 1992. In contrast, in the north-east regions, the prevalence of weight deficiency remained almost unchanged over this period, with only a slight decrease, probably because the inhabitants were mainly farm and farm/working families with better living conditions. Despite the overall increase in thinness prevalence in rural girls in Poland, different living conditions have had different biological effects.

Four special groups of women resident and obtaining abortions in one health district are described: women under 16 years and over 35 years, those undergoing a second or third abortion, and those obtaining operations later than 20 weeks gestation. These women rarely obtain adequate contraceptive advice and services, particularly when oral contraception has not proved to be suitable for them. It appears that some general practitioners do not offer a comprehensive family planning service and that this can result in women resorting to unreliable methods of birth control despite their demonstrated willingness to use contraception.

Among the very young, though most have received teaching about contraception, few appear to use any method; the confusion over the age of consent may be contributing to the failure of adults to make adequate provision for this group. The women over 35 years seemed to have little contact with family planning advice. There was a disturbing failure to meet the demand for sterilization until an unwanted pregnancy had occurred.

Patients undergoing a second or third abortion were frequently found to have contraceptive problems; there was no evidence that they were irresponsible as a group. A description of two patients obtaining operations after 20 weeks gestation illustrates the complexities of the late abortion issue. It is suggested that restrictive legislation cannot hope to contain the determination which may accompany the decision to seek abortion.

The study examines the sex imbalance at the marriageable ages according to ethnic group and religion, utilizing data obtained from the complete tabulations of the 1971 Census of Population in Sri Lanka. The active enforcement of Indian repatriation, commencing in 1971, played a major role in increasing net migration rates to significant levels in 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1975 and thereby reducing the island's growth rate to 1·45% and 1·71% in 1974 and 1975. These out-movements were further increased by the exodus of Sri Lanka citizens which began in 1972 and continued in the years 1973–75, presumably dominated by males aged 20–44 years. This emigration of Sri Lanka citizens is expected to continue and will aggravate further the difficulties of contracting a marriage within each ethnic and religious group. Possible demographic consequences are suggested.

Family planning is not being practised in Wadi Turaba in western Saudi Arabia, which is a Bedouin community with different stages of settlement. Children are wanted in the family, and the more children, especially boys, the better the social status of the family in the community. The desire of a mother for more children does not appear to be affected by her age group, history of previous marriages or history of previous pregnancies.Knowledge about contraceptives practically does not exist, except on a small scale in the settled community. Every woman, following the Koranic teachings, weans her child exactly at the age of 2 years, which obviously leads to the spacing of births. In rather rare situations, coitus interruptus is practised.

Relationships were examined between sibling variables, perceptions of learning environments and aspirations for Australian adolescents from family contexts defined conjointly by human and social capital. Generally, the findings using a regression approach indicated that sibling variables continued to have significant and often complex associations with adolescents' aspirations after taking into account relationships between perceptions of learning environments and aspirations. Also, relationships between sibling variables, perceptions of learning environments and aspirations, varied for adolescents from the different family contexts.

Although an interest in illegitimacy as a societal phenomenon is often limited by the scarcity of data, we may utilize recognized procedures of standardization in estimating illegitimacy ratios and rates where none are reported.

When we know only the age-specific marital status of women in the childbearing years (15 to 44) we may utilize age-specific legitimate and illegitimate fertility rates of the high and low illegitimacy countries, Jamaica and Japan, to estimate the range within which a national ratio would fall. In all there are sixty-eight major countries of the world for which we have that minimum data on age and marital status of females.

Some of those countries also report the number and percentage of illegitimate births but offer no information on age-specific rates. In those cases we may compare the ratios produced by the four model sets of rates (run against actual age and marital status for the sixty-eight nations) with the ratio actually reported by individual countries. Where the ratio produced by a model matches the reported ratio, with similar crude birth rates, we may assume similar age-specific legitimate and illegitimate fertility rates. Even where there is no perfect match we still learn something of the general pattern of rates.

Finally, the output of the standardization procedure also allows a comparison of the relative importance of marital status versus differential illegitimate fertility rates in determining the percentage of births out of wedlock.

While we must recognize the problems inherent in international comparisons of illegitimacy, the subject is of such significance that we cannot and we need not wait for more, or more perfect, data to be available. Rather, an increased interest in maximizing whatever comparative data we do find, may, in itself, aid in the improvement of methods and reliability of collection and publication of relevant information.

In a rural area of Bangladesh IUD acceptors in the 2 years prior to the introduction of a family planning health services programme differed from the women who accepted IUDs following the initiation of the programme. The pre-programme acceptors were older, higher parity women who were using IUDs to terminate childbearing, in contrast to the post-programme acceptors who were younger, lower parity women who were using IUDs to space the next pregnancy. The reasons for these differences are examined. The result of the programme has been a pronounced drop in the birth rate.

This paper attempts to analyse some of the local social structural factors accounting for racial attitudes towards coloured settlers, and will concentrate particularly on the way in which the coloured settlement zones, often known loosely as ghettos, promote the formation of racial attitudes and relationships in Britain.

Half the women in this study had resumed menses by the 6th month post-partum. Concurrent with these findings, less than 50% were still breast-feeding at the 6th month post-partum. The majority of these breast-feeding women were partially breast-feeding. By the 6th post-partum month more than 90% of the women had resumed intercourse and slightly less than half were using contraceptives. Nevertheless, the cross-sectional data indicate that only 25% of the women were using contraceptives at 12 months post-partum. These results show a much shorter period of lactational amenorrhoea than has been reported for a rural area of Bangladesh.