The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) in its Publication 60 introduced important changes in the concept of risk-related quantities. For external neutron radiation in particular the introduction of the equivalent dose with the radiation weighting factor$w_{{\rm R}}$ instead of the dose equivalent concept with the quality factor Q(L) has many consequences. The value of$w_{{\rm R}}$ is defined by the external neutron radiation field, while the radiation quality in the phantom depends on the radiation field at the position of interest and hence on the size of and the position in the phantom. It has been investigated to what extent the size of the phantom influences the mean radiation quality in the phantoms. For incident monoenergetic neutrons, mean photon dose contributions and mean quality factors have been calculated. Results are presented for various phantoms which characterize the conditions for a mouse, a rat, the ICRU sphere and a human body.

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