The effect of secular trends in the classroom furniture mismatch: support for continuous update of school furniture standards

Abstract

In order to create safer schools, the Chilean authorities published a Standard regarding school furniture dimensions. The aims of this study are twofold: to verify the existence of positive secular trend within the Chilean student population and to evaluate the potential mismatch between the anthropometric characteristics and the school furniture dimensions defined by the mentioned standard. The sample consists of 3078 subjects. Eight anthropometric measures were gathered, together with six furniture dimensions from the mentioned standard. There is an average increase for some dimensions within the Chilean student population over the past two decades. Accordingly, almost 18% of the students will find the seat height to be too high. Seat depth will be considered as being too shallow for 42.8% of the students. It can be concluded that the Chilean student population has increased in stature, which supports the need to revise and update the data from the mentioned Standard.

Abstract

Practitioner Summary: Positive secular trend resulted in high levels of mismatch if furniture is selected according to the current Chilean Standard which uses data collected more than 20 years ago. This study shows that school furniture standards need to be updated over time.

Keywords::

• school
• furniture
• standard
• secular trend
• mismatch

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the participating schools, as well as the eight physiotherapy students for their collaboration in the measurement process (Richard Díaz, Alexis Pino, Carla Guastavino, Valentina Véliz, Agustina Cárdenas, Ignacio Merino, Patricia Moya and Cristobal Olguin). The authors also wish to acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Mónica Catalán, for her helpful statistical advice. Finally, the authors would also like to thank Raymond E. Jarvis III for editorial support.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo en Salud (FONIS) N° SA11I2105, Gobierno de Chile (National Fund for Health Research and Development, Chilean Government).