Development and Assessment of Postcranial Sex Estimation Methods for a Guatemalan Population1. Issue 2 (5th June 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fowler, Gillian; Hughes, Cris
• Is Part Of: Journal of forensic sciences. Volume 63:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 490
• Page End: 496
• Publication Date: 2017-06-05
• Subjects: forensic science -- forensic anthropology -- Hispanic -- sex estimation -- postcranial measurements -- migrant; Medical jurisprudence -- Periodicals; Forensic sciences -- Periodicals; Forensic Medicine -- Periodicals; Gerechtelijke geneeskunde; Gerechtelijke chemie; Gerechtelijke psychiatrie; 363.2505
• DOI: 10.1111/1556-4029.13570
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0022-1198

Abstract

Abstract: This study tests whether postcranial sex estimation methods generated from Hispanic, and mainly Mexican samples, can be successfully applied to other increasingly common migrant populations from Central America. We use a sample of postcranial data from a modern (1980s) Guatemalan Maya sample ( n = 219). Results indicate a decrease in classification accuracies for previously established univariate methods when applied to the Guatemalan study sample, specifically for males whose accuracies ranged from 30 to 84%. This bias toward inaccuracies for Guatemalan males is associated with the smaller skeletal sizes for the Guatemalan sample as compared to the samples used in the tested sex estimation methods. In contrast, the tested multivariate discriminant function classification yielded less sex bias and improved classification accuracies ranging from 82 to 89%. Our results highlight which of the tested univariate and multivariate methods reach acceptable levels for accuracy for sex estimation of cases where the region of origin may include Guatemala.