Birth order and family size of school-phobic adolescents.
A hundred school-phobic youngers were investigated for birth order and family size. Ninety-one non-school-phobic admissions and 127 normal secondary school children of similar age were used for comparison. It was found that the school phobics tended to be late in birth order when they came from families with three or more children in them. The two control groups, however, did not differ significantly from what would be expected on theoretical grounds. The mean value of Slater's index for the school phobics was 0.5942, which is significantly greater than the expected value of 0.5.

Only children occurred in similar proportions in the school phobics, the normal secondary school controls and a large sample of boys previously surveyed by the Scottish Council for Research in Education. The family size distribution, more generally, did not differ significantly between the school phobics and normal secondary school youngsters. Reasons are given why it was not considered necessary to use the Greenwood and Yule method of correction for family size estimations.

The non-school-phobic cases bore some resemblance to a sample of delinquent boys, previously studied, in their birth order and family size characteristics.

It is suggested that the raised maternal age of the school-phobic group may be of aetiological importance in this condition.