Abstract
Purpose: :
To determine whether children's attitudes about their peers are affected by spectacle wear.
Methods: :
Pictures of 12 children not wearing glasses had spectacles digitally superimposed so that both pictures of the children with and without the spectacles had the same facial expression. Subjects then compared 24 pairs of the children's pictures that differed by gender, race, and spectacle wear, and answered which child would ...you rather play with, ...looks smarter, ...looks better at playing sports, ...is better looking, ...looks more shy, and ...looks more honest. A logistic model was fit using SAS, accounting for correlated data, to model the chance that a subject chooses the image of a child wearing spectacles.
Results: :
Of the 80 subjects, 53% were female, 64% were white, 26% were black, 38% wore spectacles, and the average (± SD) age was 8.3 ± 1.3 years. Fitting models independently for each question, the covariates included gender, age, ethnicity, and spectacle wear of the subjects as well as whether the subjects’ parents or siblings wore glasses and gender and ethnicity of the child’s image. No variable was consistently included in the final model, but the variable most consistently included was gender of the child in the image. A female wearing spectacles was significantly more likely to be chosen when the question was which child ...is better looking, ...looks smarter, and ...looks more honest; a female wearing glasses was less likely to be chosen when asked which child looks better at playing sports. Spectacle wear by the child in the images was never a significant variable. When the pictures of the twelve children were included in the model as random effects, the only significant effect was question asked. Subjects were significantly more likely to say that a spectacle wearer looked smarter, more honest, and less shy.
Conclusions: :
Because different results were obtained after including the 12 subjects in the model as random effects, it was difficult to determine whether the demographics (gender, ethnicity, spectacle wear) of the children in the images or the individual children played a more significant role when subjects answered the questions. However, children wearing glasses may appear smarter, more honest, and less shy to their peers.
Keywords: clinical (human) or epidemiologic studies: treatment/prevention assessment/controlled clinical trials • quality of life