A Research on the Types of Middle Aged Women's Body Figures

중년 여성의 체형에 관한 연구 - 직접계측을 중심으로 -

This research aims to classify the physical characteristics of middle aged women. The characteristics are esteemed to be adopted for the formalisation of the types of their body figures and their characteristics for each type. For this purpose, middle aged women in the significant change of their body shapes were sampled for body measurement which would be used for the comparison between each measured figure. A group of sample for this research was constructed with 154 middle aged women who is currently living in Seoul and its Metropolitan area and being in their age of $35{\sim}59$. Particularly, the analysis on the girth of belly shows a significant difference subject to each age group so that a distinguished change in the girth of belly is observed as the age gets older. With the SPSS programme, the physical characteristics of middle aged women were analysed by the variation analysis and correlation analysis. In terms of the analysis on the body mass index and the flatness index, the observed result that there is a significant difference between the indices for late middle aged women and early and mid middle aged women shows far more different result from Yu-Kyung Choi(1997) that the body figures of middle aged women tend to start rapidly to change from their ages of 49. This can be explained to some extent in that the increased interest in much healthier and slimmer body shapes beginning from widely-spread so called "well-being" syndrome results in the increase in the number of middle aged women taking care of their health management so that the ages starting their body shape to become obese tend to be deferred. Another explanation is also feasible to partly extent that the middle aged women living in Seoul and Kyung-Gi area are much more looking after their health management than those living in other areas. However, this research has a limitation in that the physical measurement for this research has been conducted focusing on the women living in Seoul and Kyung-Gi area. Hence, it is further expected going forward that the physical measurement for middle aged women living in other areas should follow for the comparison purpose.