[COLOR="Red"]At ages 7 and 11[/COLOR], the teacher of each NCDS respondent is
asked to describe the child's physical appearance, by choosing
up to three adjectives from a highly eclectic list of five:
“attractive,” “unattractive or not attractive,” “looks underfed
or undernourished,” “abnormal feature,” and “scruffy or
slovenly & dirty.” A respondent is coded as attractive=1 if
he or she is described as “attractive” at both age 7 and age 11
by two different teachers, 0 otherwise. I use this binary
measure of physical attractiveness as the independent
variable. 62.0% of all NCDS respondents are coded as
attractive.
Zebrowitz, Olson and Hoffman (1993) analysis of the
longitudinal data from the Intergenerational Studies of
Development and Aging shows that individuals' relative
physical attractiveness remains very stable across the life
course. Their structural equation model suggests that physical
attractiveness in childhood (measured between the ages of 9
and 10) is significantly positively correlated with physical
attractiveness in puberty (measured between the ages of 12
and 13 for girls and 14 and 15 for boys) (r=.70 for boys,
r=.79 for girls), and physical attractiveness in puberty is
significantly positively correlated with physical attractiveness
in adolescence (measured between the ages of 17 and
18) (r=.72 for boys, r=.70 for girls). This suggests that
physical attractiveness in childhood is correlated with
physical attractiveness in adolescence at r=.504 for boys
and r=.553 for girls.