Estimation Of Gender and Stature from The Footwear Dimensions

Abstract

Footwear impression marks and footwear are among the most commonly found evidence at crime scenes. This study intends to determine if the sex and height of an individual can be identified by footwear dimensions. The statistical analyses were conducted by using logistic regression and multiple linear regression analysis for sex and height prediction, respectively. For this experiment, footwear length, and footwear width of 200 subjects, comprising 100 females and 100 males ranging from 18 to 58 years of age, was taken. It was found that the mean height of the male subjects was 171.98 ± 6.15 cm while that of the female participants was 162.45 ± 5.68 cm. The mean widths of their shoes in male and female cases were 11.69 ± 1.19 cm and 10.08 ± 0.85 cm, respectively and the average shoe lengths for the two cases were 28.94 ± 1.55 cm and 26.72 ± 1.18 cm respectively. Multivariate discriminant function models were developed for sex allocations. The logistic regression formula was obtained as follows: sex = 120.072 – 1.037 (shoe length) + 3.210(shoe width) – 3.061(shoe number). Statistical analyses showed that multivariate model correctly assign approximately 76.7 – 96.7% of individuals to their correct sex groups. Both shoe length and width were used for estimate of a person’s height using multiple regression analysis. The predictive value was described by the formula: height (cm) = 67.719 + 2.836 (shoe length (cm)) +1.894 (shoe width (cm)), R2 = 0.932. It was found that the length and width of the shoes in the male and female sample groups had a high relationship with the height. This study is demonstrated that the dimension of the shoe can be used to estimate stature and sex of the shoe owner. The information may be useful in the forensic investigation of criminal case.