Forensic Anthropology Population DataA critical review of sub-adult age estimation in biological anthropology: Do methods comply with published recommendations?
Section snippets
Material
This work focuses on age estimation for post-natal sub-adults only. Therefore, age estimation methods specifically concerning fetuses [13], [44] were not included in this study.
Publications were collected from various online and university databases. To comply with the first recommendation by Cunha and collaborators (see above) and be included in the corpus, they had to meet one of three conditions: be published in peer-reviewed journals as original research articles, be cited and tested in
Definitions of the sampling and statistical parameters of the publications
Following the published recommendations cited above, we aimed to characterize each publication of the corpus as objectively as possible by identifying and defining a set of parameters describing their sampling and statistical protocols. The 11 recommendations presented above were placed into three groups of parameters to characterize the publications (Table 1): two recommendations concern conditions for publication, five concern sampling parameters, and four concern statistical parameters. All
Results
The general distribution of the sampling and statistical parameters of the 269 publications is presented in Fig. 1: only three sampling parameters (“Age”, “Sex” and “Sex distribution”) are predominantly valid. Methods with samples presenting even age distributions are not. These observations are even more striking for the statistical parameters: only two statistical parameters (“Standard error of estimation” and “Method validation”) are mostly valid.
The proportion of methodologically “valid”
Discussion
Results show that methodological recommendations published by AGFAD [10] and other authors [5], [34], [65] regarding sampling and statistical protocols for sub-adult age estimation are far from being respected. According to these methodological recommendations, anthropological methods should always indicate or provide a means to calculate reliability, standard estimation error and accuracy to ensure methodological validity. AGFAD also recommends authors should include the repeatability and
Conclusion
This study used the methodological recommendations presented in several publications concerning age estimation in forensic anthropology to objectively evaluate the sampling and statistical parameters of 269 sub-adult age estimation methods available to anthropologists and used in the forensic context. Our analysis showed that only 2.6% (7 out of 269) of the methods respected all valid sampling and statistical parameters. Although most methods are constructed on individuals of known age and
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education for awarding us the funding necessary for this work and the staff of the University Paris Descartes Medicine library for their help in acquiring the documents used in this study.
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2023, Forensic Science InternationalHow low can we go? A skeletal maturity threshold for probabilistic visual sex estimation from immature human os coxae
2021, Forensic Science InternationalCitation Excerpt :This is particularly problematic if age estimation methods built on these historic samples are applied to contemporary forensic cases based on a specific age cut-off without accounting for the effects of secular trends. Although more and more subadult age estimation methods based on large contemporary samples are being published (e.g., [21]; Stull et al., 2014), a lot of subadult age estimation methods are based on these historic subadult skeletal collections [2,22,80]. In contemporary samples, and for forensic cases in particular for which the timing of skeletal maturity is comparable, applying a maturity-based approach instead of relying on chronological age as a cut-off for method application could bypass any prior need for age estimation – thus avoiding estimation error.
General considerations about data and selection of statistical approaches
2020, Statistics and Probability in Forensic AnthropologyA critical response to “A critical review of sub-adult age estimation in biological anthropology” by Corron, Marchal, Condemi and Adalian (2018)
2019, Forensic Science InternationalSub-adult aging method selection (SAMS): A decisional tool for selecting and evaluating sub-adult age estimation methods based on standardized methodological parameters
2019, Forensic Science InternationalCitation Excerpt :Some methods, mainly older publications, presented incomplete or unclear sampling and/or statistical parameters were concerned. To account for this, the “Unknown” category was added to the selective parameters (see Corron et al. [1]). This can potentially modify the outcoming validity and score values if the unknown categories concern one or several of the nine parameters for which validity or invalidity was assessed using methodological recommendations [3–6].