Conventional Lifestyle Research Articles

L’abandon de la carrière criminelle : quelques témoignages

This article summarizes some of the findings of research done on the relinquishing of a criminal career. It is based on about twenty interviews, carried out between July and November 1984, with multirecedivist ex-criminals who had abandoned their criminal careers for at least five years prior to the study. We isolated the factors that dissuaded them from continuing this way of life as well as others that caused them to adopt a more conventional lifestyle. It is a question of the difficulties connected with a criminal way of life — whether it be with one's criminal colleagues, rival gangs, informers, or the police, lawyers and the courts. There follows a series of bad experiences concerning prison life : the accumulation of sentences and years of prison, the living conditions, problems with the officers and guards, the presence of other inmates. But there are also positive things one discovers in prison whether it be new knowledge, new responsibilities or the help of people outside, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or the chaplains or at the emotional level, of a wife or mate. We see, based on these factors, some of the difficulties that the ex-criminal must face if he wants to persevere in following a conventional lifestyle.

Canada: Agreement Between Patient and Proxy Information About Colorectal Cancer Therapies

Proxies, such as next of kin, often provide information to healthcare professionals about a cancer patient they know, particularly when this information is not available from the patient. Understanding the extent to which proxies offer reliable information about patients is important for improving the quality of patient care and also for assessing the quality of research, evaluation, and administrative data when proxy response is utilized. This study determined Levels of agreement between information reported by colorectal cancer patients and by their proxies about complementary and alternative medicine obtained by questionnaire response. Patient-proxy agreement was also compared for conventional therapies, patient demographics, lifestyle, and symptoms.

Tourism-Based Analysis and Development Potentials in Hortobágy

Tourism – especially ecotourism and health-tourism – could be one of the sectors which could make Hungary economically competitive after joining the European Union, by ensuring thousands of people employment possibilities, if they take advantage of local and regional opportunities. For this reason, it would be necessary to analyse the two types of tourism mentioned above, as well as to collect data and especially impressions concerning how these potentially lucrative sectors could best be structured and managed, as well as to predict their probable effects.The most important objectives of my study are to introduce the values of Hortobágy, to analyse the present status of tourism in the Hortobágy National Park, and to make suggestions for increasing the numbers of tourists, by making Hortobágy more attractive.As a resident of Debrecen, I visited the region several times and took part in programs at Hortobágy as well. I was always curious how the trip to the Hortobágy could be made more enjoyable.My research was carried out with the help of questionnaires, which were made in three languages – Hungarian, English and German –. In August 2002, I approached foreign and Hungarian tourists in Hortobágy village, and asked them to fill them in. To evaluate the questionnaires, I used Microsoft Excel ’00. During the evaluation, I calculated distribution, arithmetic mean and deviation. Moreover, I obtained the level of significance.My assumption that tourists visiting Hortobágy are “one-day” tourists, who are visiting the Hungarian Pusta because of an actual program, was supported by my research. I must emphasise that mostly passive tourism opportunities are offered in Hortobágy, where tourist are only external observers of the programs.In order to change this situation, I suggested that visitors to Hortobágy can be encouraged to stay longer by offering them various programs, in which tourists are actively involved. My program recommendations include a craftsman’s house or tent, where the visitors can try to make typical folk instruments. Moreover, I made suggestions as to how to teach tourists to make Hungarian dishes. I also outlined several one-day program possibilities. Among the opportunities, I also mentioned the need to provide tourists possibilities to spend several days in a conventional Pusta life-style. To realise these things adequate infrastructure and information system should be developed.

Mastretta y Sus Protagonistas, Ejemplos de Emancipación Femenina

Angeles Mastretta has become one of the most promising Mexican writers in modern Hispanicamerican literature in the last years. She has published five novels: Arráncame la vida (1985), Mujeres de ojos grandes (1990), Puerto libre (1993), Mal de amores (1995) and El mundo iluminado (1999). In her novels the central figure of the narration is the 'woman'. Mastretta empowers her with a subversive and emancipating discourse. Based on the feminine protagonists in her works, I present the idea of independence and sexual liberation with Catalina Ascencio, Emilia Sauri, and the numerous aunts as examples. The author succeeds in making these characters independent of any prestablished socio-cultural canon and, thus, frees them from a conventional lifestyle. These women are ahead of their time and to achieve this social liberation, which society does not give them, they must use their emancipated sexuality as a liberating force.

Mastretta y Sus Protagonistas, Ejemplos de Emancipación Femenina

Angeles Mastretta has become one of the most promising Mexican writers in modern Hispanicamerican literature in the last years. She has published five novels: Arráncame la vida (1985), Mujeres de ojos grandes (1990), Puerto libre (1993), Mal de amores (1995) and El mundo iluminado (1999). In her novels the central figure of the narration is the 'woman'. Mastretta empowers her with a subversive and emancipating discourse. Based on the feminine protagonists in her works, I present the idea of independence and sexual liberation with Catalina Ascencio, Emilia Sauri, and the numerous aunts as examples. The author succeeds in making these characters independent of any prestablished socio-cultural canon and, thus, frees them from a conventional lifestyle. These women are ahead of their time and to achieve this social liberation, which society does not give them, they must use their emancipated sexuality as a liberating force.

Samhällstjänsten som ett självdisciplinerande straff

This article presents findings from an interview study of 28 persons serving sentences of community service. The interviews were conducted during the spring of 1999. Subjects reported believing that successful completion of their community service - which often lasted several months - required them to assume more responsibility for their own lives. The average length of time served doing community service was 140 hours. The sentence was usually served twice a week, four hours at a time. Depending on a person’s life circumstances, community service was performed either on weekends or during the evenings after working hours. Unemployed persons doing community service served their time during the day. All of those interviewed thought that community service, when performed in this way, required that they be able to plan their everyday lives in the long-term. This was by no means easy for all of them. Most of those interviewed had been, or still were, drinkers or drug users, and therefore remained involved in a kind of lifestyle that diverged in many ways from the conventional lifestyle based on paid work. The long-term planning and regularity demanded by community service required many of those interviewed to force themselves to behave, for example, by not drinking, so as not to spoil their chances of completing their punishment.

Modeling the Effect of Spontaneous Activity on Core Temperature in Healthy Human Subjects

Nine healthy females were studied about the time of the spring equinox, while living in student accommodation and aware of the passage of solar time. After 7 control days, during which a conventional lifestyle was lived, subjects underwent a 24-h ‘constant routine’, followed by 17 ‘days’ on a 27-h ‘day’ (9 h sleep and 18 h wake). Throughout the experiment, regular recordings of (non-dominant) wrist activity (every 30 s) and rectal temperature (every 6 min) were made. Only the control and 27-h (experimental) ‘days’ have been analysed in the present report. From each subject, 24-h profiles of raw temperature (consisting of 240 points) were obtained: one (control days), by averaging the control days; the other (experimental days), by conflating 16 consecutive 27-h ‘days’. Activity data were first collected into 240 points by summing them over 6-min intervals; they were then converted into three data sets (each of 240 points) for control and, separately, for experimental days. These data sets were summed activities in the previous 18 min (A18), summed activity over the previous 18–30 min (A30), and summed activity over the previous 30–42 min (A42). The raw temperature data sets for control and experimental days were sepa-rately analysed by ANCOVA using two time-of-day factors: ‘hours’ (24 levels) and ‘six-minute-intervals’ (10 levels). The covariate was the three activity data sets; in order to make the analysis more versatile, a cubic polynomial model was used, with a linear, quadratic and cubic term for each of these activity data sets. Moreover, the effects of activity upon core temperature were separately assessed for four 6-h sections of the 24-h profile, centred on its low, rising, high and falling phases. The main results were as follows: 1. All three activity data sets made significant contributions to the model, but that by the A30 data set was the most powerful of the three. This supports the use of activity files covering the previous 30 min in other ‘purification’ methods. 2. Although the linear term was the one that was significant most frequently, quadratic and (negative) cubic terms were also present on several occasions. This result indicates that the effect of activity upon core temperature can be approximated by a linear function (as has been done in other ‘purification’ models), but that, with wider ranges of activity, a sigmoid curve would be more accurate, indicative of the process of thermoregulation. 3. During the experimental days, the effect of activity upon temperature was greater in the rising than the falling temperature phase, and greater in the low than in the high phase. These results are predicted from current understanding of the circadian rhythm of thermoregulation. 4. During control days, the effects of activity were more complex, probably due to the factors that were present at some, but not all, phases — factors such as sleep, meals, changes in posture, lighting, and so on. 5. The ANCOVA also enabled the temperature profiles, corrected for the effects of activity (and, therefore, to be considered as ‘purified’), to be displayed. We conclude that the use of ANCOVA to tackle the problem of ‘purifying’ raw temperature data is a promising one. So far, it has produced results that accord with those from other ‘purification’ methods and with predictions based on our current understanding of the circadian rhythm of thermoregulation.

Comparison of soft tissue body composition in postmenopausal women with or without hormone replacement therapy considering the influence of reproductive history and lifestyle

OBJECTIVES: To examine long-term effects of at least 5 years' conventional hormone replacement therapy (HRT), reproductive history and lifestyle on fat mass and muscle mass in postmenopausal women. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: A cross-sectional retrospective approach was used, including 64 healthy women (56-69 years, mean age 63.4 years). Hormone users were compared with age-matched non-users with respect to (a) type of HRT used (oestrogen vs oestrogen plus gestagen vs no hormones), (b) categories of oestrogens used (oestradiol-based oestrogens vs conjugated equine oestrogens vs no oestrogens) and (c) categories of gestagens used (testosterone derivatives vs progesterone derivatives vs no gestagens). Data on hormone use, reproductive history (age at menarche, age at menopause, number of years postmenopausal, number of children) and lifestyle (physical activity level, alcohol consumption, smoking habits) were collected by questionnaires. Body composition was analysed by multiple-frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis, estimating fat mass, fat-free mass and body cell mass as absolute values (FM, FFM, BCM, respectively) and percentages of body weight (% FM, % FFM, % BCM). RESULTS: Analysis of covariance, adjusting body composition variables for body mass index, showed that (a) unopposed oestrogen users, oestrogen plus gestagen users and non-users did not differ significantly in body composition variables, (b) users of oestradiol-based oestrogens had significantly more BCM than oestrogen abstainers (p < 0.05), (c) users of testosterone-based gestagens had more BCM than gestagen abstainers (p = 0.05). Stepwise multiple regression analyses, including HRT-related, reproductive and lifestyle variables, indicated that the duration of HRT (p < 0.05) and physical activity level (p = 0.01) were significant positive predictors of % BCM, whereas the number of children significantly positively predicted FM and % FM (each p < 0.05). No significant associations between fat-free mass and HRT were found. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that conventional doses of oestrogens and gestagens used in HRT might be a factor in preserving muscle mass after long-term administration. It is recommended that BCM is used instead of FFM as an indicator of muscle mass. Studies relating muscle mass to HRT in postmenopausal women should consider physical activity as a possible confounding variable.

Individual risk prediction and population-wide disease prevention.

Epidemiologists seem to be engaged in a ceaseless search for factors for disease. An increasingly important consequence of this activity is the categorization of individuals according to personal disease risk. This search for factors is being conducted with the hope of more accurately isolating groups of high individuals; that is, the goal is to identify factors with high relative risks and with a correspondingly good ability to discriminate between diseased and nondiseased individuals. However, most known factors associated with chronic diseases (with the important exceptions of heavy smoking and certain occupational exposures, such as asbestos) have modest relative risks. At the individual level, most factors have poor discriminatory power, or poor positive predictive value. Some persons in the low risk or unexposed category will develop disease, while the majority of those who are exposed will remain healthy. One of the goals in the burgeoning field of genetic epidemiology is to extend the search for factors into the human genome, to uncover high individuals who were hitherto hidden within exposures defined by conventional lifestyle or environmental factors. Speculating on the future of genetic epidemiology, Feigelson et al. noted that expanded knowledge in this area should lead to more refined definitions of 'high-risk' individuals... and, hopefully, lead us to be able to better define who may benefit from specific interventions based on underlying genetic susceptibility (1, p. 20). In a similar vein, Khoury stated that new gene discoveries, which occur on an almost daily basis, require that the public health community take a leadership role in translating the results of these dis-

A COMPARISON OF SOME DIFFERENT METHODS FOR PURIFYING CORE TEMPERATURE DATA FROM HUMANS

Nine healthy females were studied about the time of the spring equinox while living in student accommodations and aware of the passage of solar time. After 7 control days, during which a conventional lifestyle was lived under a 24h “constant routine,” the subjects lived 17 × 27h “days” (9h sleep in the dark and 18h wake using domestic lighting, if required). Throughout the experiment, recordings of wrist activity and rectal (core) temperature were taken. The raw temperature data were assessed for phase and amplitude by cosinor analysis and another method, “crossover times,” which does not assume that the data set is sinusoidal. Two different purification methods were used in attempts to remove the masking effects of sleep and activity from the core temperature record and so to measure more closely the endogenous component of this rhythm; these two methods were “purification by categories” and “purification by intercepts.” The former method assumes that the endogenous component is a sinusoid, and that the masking effects can be estimated by putting activity into a number of bands or categories. The latter method assumes that a temperature that would correspond to complete inactivity can be estimated from measured temperatures by linear regression of these on activity and extrapolation to a temperature at zero activity. Three indices were calculated to assess the extent to which exogenous effects had been removed from the temperature data by these purification methods. These indices were the daily variation of phase about its median value; the ratio of this variation to the daily deviation of phase about midactivity; and the relationship between amplitude and the square of the deviation of phase from midactivity. In all cases, the index would decrease in size as the contribution of the exogenous component to a data set fell. The purification by categories approach was successful in proportion to the number of activity categories that was used, and as few as four categories produced a data set with significantly less masking than raw data. The method purification by intercepts was less successful unless the raw data had been “corrected” to reflect the direct effects of sleep that were independent of activity (a method to achieve this being produced). Use of this purification method with the corrected data then gave results that showed least exogenous influences. Both this method and the purification by categories method with 16 categories of activity gave evidence that the exogenous component no longer made a significant contribution to the purified data set. The results were not significantly influenced by assessing amplitude and phase of the circadian rhythm from crossover times rather than cosinor analysis. The relative merits of the different methods, as well as of other published methods, are compared briefly; it is concluded that several purification methods, of differing degrees of sophistication and ease of application to raw data, are of value in field studies and other circumstances in which constant routines are not possible or are ethically undesirable. It is also concluded that such methods are often somewhat limited insofar as they are based on pragmatic or biological, rather than mathematical, considerations, and so it is desirable to attempt to develop models based equally on mathematics and biology. (Chronobiology International, 17(4), 539–566, 2000)

Gender, gambling and problem gambling

With data from a 1989 Iowa survey (N=1,011), adult male and female respondents are compared on their problem gambling, its correlates, as well as their gambling behavior. Gambling behavior means its scope, frequency, wagering and leisure time spent at gambling. Women's gambling behavior was lower than that of men, due to their having a narrower scope of gambling behavior, but the genders were not significantly different on frequency, wagering and time spent at gambling. Women and men did not differ significantly on problem gambling. Problem gambling is measured as loss of control over gambling, and consequences due to gambling as well as gambling behavior. Women and men did differ significantly, however, on several predictors of problem gambling. Women's estrangement from a conventional lifestyle and integration into a social world of gambling appeared to help explain their problem gambling. Alcohol consumption appeared to be a more important predictor for men than women. The genders shared the attitude that the odds can be beat as well as being big spenders as predictors of their problem gambling. The results are interpreted with practitioners' efforts to prevent and treat problem gambling in mind.

Drugs, Delinquency and “Nerds”: Are Loners Deviant?

Many studies have focused on the influence of peers on delinquency and drug use. But what about adolescents who are not part of the peer culture--the loners, or nerds? This study focuses on drug use, delinquency and lifestyle correlates of LONERS and SOCIALS. Data for a nine-year period (1976 through 1984) from the Monitoring the Future data set of high school seniors across the United States are analyzed. The lack of peer influence on the LONERS seems to contribute to less delinquency and drug use and more conventional lifestyle activities than is found among SOCIALS.

Effects upon circadian rhythmicity of an alteration to the sleep-wake cycle: problems of assessment resulting from measurement in the presence of sleep and analysis in terms of a single shifted component.

Experiments were performed upon groups of three or four human subjects in an isolation chamber (total n = 14). Subjects lived initially on a conventional lifestyle and then delayed their hours of sleep by 8 hr (so mimicking some aspects of nightwork) for 2 or 5 days. They also performed two constant routines--protocols designed to minimize any effects due to the environment, mealtimes, and activity. Regular samples of urine were taken when subjects were awake, and were analyzed for sodium, potassium, and chloride; rectal temperature was measured and logged at 6-min intervals throughout. Shifts in circadian rhythms produced by the change in sleep time were assessed by cosinor and cross-correlation techniques. The protocol enabled these assessments to be made on days when sleep was allowed and under constant-routine conditions, so that masking and behavioral effects could be investigated also. The results confirmed that adjustment to the change in sleep time was slow and only partial, and that assessments made on days when sleep was allowed overestimated this adjustment. Furthermore, it was concluded that, whereas cosinor and cross-correlation techniques using only one shifting component were equally useful in describing the observed changes, both were inferior to a cross-correlation technique that made use of two shifting components. Some practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay

Chu explains the rise of religious toleration in America through an examination of the Puritan response to Quakerism in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. He casts the phenomenon in a new light, arguing that toleration for Quakerism emerged out of the very values and structures of Puritan life in Massachusetts Bay as early as the 1660s. Intolerance, Chu submits, became a threat to the separation of church and state, of local and central authority. The interaction of local forces and interests thus led to a rapid adjustment to and toleration of the Quakers. Chu illustrates this through an examination of Quaker populations in the townships of Kittery and Salem. He describes how the Quakers lived and suggests why they eventually turned from radical proselytizing missionary work to a more restrained and conventional lifestyle.