Abstract: This study was designed to study the mor phological differences and sim?ilarities of Chi-nese minority nationalities girls by using princi pal component analysis combining with clusteranalysis. The data. consisted of 32 groups from 27 minority nationalities (each of the five ofthese nationalities had an urban group besides the rural one), and in each group, seven anth-ropometric measures and indices· were used for analysing.These groups merged into seven clusters and showed significant variations of growth and development. with each other. The factors which caused these variations, such as the geography, ecology, socio- economics and lifestyles as well as the urban-rural difference, were investigated. The different growth characteri-stics among different nationalities and some strategies of improving their growth were also dis-cussed by the author.

Key words: Adolescent; Growth; Development; Minority nationalities; Cluster analysis