Aid Thoughts

I've been working with data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (a birth cohort study from the Philippines). I ran across this while looking through the baseline documentation (from the mid-80s):

Anthropometric measurements of mothers and infants, particularly height measurements, often became a delicate issue. Objections were frequently raised not by the mothers but their onlooking husbands who claimed that their wives or children were being 'measured for a coffin'. With respect to the measurements of mothers, the objections were rooted in the folding measuring sticks used, the same type of instrument also used by carpenters when measuring a corpse for a coffin. In one instance, the interviewer was literally thrown out of the house when attempting to measure the mother's height.

The idea that infants were measured for a coffin had to do with the infantometers used. When unfolded, these look like small boxes. In addition and unfortunately, the infantometers had been varnished in the same dark-brown color in which coffins usually are varnished. This 'impediment' was overcome by pasting onto the infantometers large numbers of pictures of flowers or animals to make them look like toys.