ABSTRACT
During recent years, the quality of life is increasing with the development of society and economy in Taiwan. The change on body size and shape for preschool children is obviously. Furthermore, the segmental proportion is varied with the improvement in nutrition and living type. Therefore, previous anthropometric data of Taiwanese children becomes out of time. The demand of new children's anthropometric data for designing and manufacturing more convenient children products is urgent. One of the urgent requests is the data for children's sizing system. The tailoring firms in Taiwan usually adopt other country's children sizing system to manufacture domestic children garment because of the incompleteness and outmoded domestic sizing system. Besides, there are various considerations to formulate the domestic children sizing systems for different countries (Chung, 2003). Without exact data, no applicable sizing system could be achieved. Proper anthropometric data should be sufficient, correct and up to date. Moreover, the regional diversity in Taiwan should not be disregarded since the migration from countries to cities with the demand of work and sociality. Most of the past anthropometric surveys were done for the children in northern or southern Taiwan but rare for children in Central Taiwanese. The study of establishing Taiwanese anthropometric database conducted a large-scale survey to collect about 10 thousand people's data (Wang et aI., 1999 and Wang et aI., 2001). The elementary student sample is also an impOliant part of the study. However, only students aged above 6 were measured. Thus, an up-to-date sizing system to meet the preschool children's body shape and size is important in Central Taiwan.
