Everyday Choices Research Articles

Correlates of Everyday Choice and Support-Related Choice for 8,892 Randomly Sampled Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in 19 States

This article examines everyday choices made by 8,892 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and support-related choices made by 6,179 adults with IDD receiving services from 19 state developmental disabilities program agencies that participated in the 2008-2009 National Core Indicators Project. Controlling for physical and sensory impairment, age, behavioral support, communication, and state, people in residential settings with 16 or more people had less everyday choice than those in other living arrangements. People with mild and moderate IDD had more control over everyday choices when living in their own homes, whereas people with severe and profound IDD had more control when living in agency homes of 3 or fewer residents. For people of all levels of IDD, institutional settings of 16 or more residents offered the lowest levels of everyday choice. Controlling for the same covariates, individuals with all levels of IDD living in their own homes had significantly more support-related choices than those in any other residential arrangement. Controlling for individual and residential setting characteristics, the state in which sample members lived was notably predictive of support-related choice. Overall, the tested variables accounted for 44% of the variability in everyday choice and 31% in support-related choice.

The disgust-promotes-disposal effect

Individuals tend toward status quo bias: preferring existing options over new ones. There is a countervailing phenomenon: Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them, such as foul-smelling food. But what if the source of disgust is independent of the object? We induced disgust via a film clip to see if participants would trade away an item (a box of unidentified office supplies) for a new item (alternative unidentified box). Such “incidental disgust” strongly countered status quo bias. Disgusted people exchanged their present possession 51% of the time compared to 32% for people in a neutral state. Thus, disgust promotes disposal. A second experiment tested whether a warning about this tendency would diminish it. It did not. These results indicate a robust disgust-promotes-disposal effect. Because these studies presented real choices with tangible rewards, their findings have implications for everyday choices and raise caution about the effectiveness of warnings about biases.

Globalization, reflexivity, and the project of the self: a virtual intercultural learning process

In this paper, the authors examine the consumption practices of young adult Iranians in the context of cultural globalization. Based on the analysis of qualitative data collected through participatory observation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with 28 individuals in Tehran and Karaj, the authors demonstrate how, through its cultural flow (circulation of images, signs, products, etc.) globalization stimulates reflexivity in “an ongoing process of virtual intercultural learning” through which people reconstitute their lives and change their everyday consumption practices and lifestyle choices. The key contribution of the study lies in the fact that it examines consumers’ subjective consumption experiences in a society where the traditional/institutional dynamics enforce their own values and ideal lifestyles on individuals.

P-872 - Coping mechanism of women workers: socio-psychological perspective

This study looked into the development of coping strategies among women workers in their work life. This was both a survey of 613 women worker in 31 industries. This study provided an overview of the various forms of coping mechanisms at work towards and against the process of globalization, which include personal and local resistance, A contextualized form of resistance is shown in the ethnography of women work in EPZ's. In the case study and the ethnography of women's work in EPZ's, a study of the dynamics of resistance is offered by looking into the subtext of everyday individual and collective activities that may otherwise not be categorized as open confrontation against established structures. Such forms of struggle are played out in the everyday resistance of the women. The women carve out spaces in their struggles to become agencies for change. Resistance is not only directed towards a political society or the state.The everyday experiences and resistance of women workers include, among others: they develop ‘self-help’ strategies to alleviate their work and health burdens such as joining in-house labor unions. They also develop a system of interaction and assistance among themselves. The study has shown that the arena of coping unfolds in the everyday choices and actions of women workers which presents a form of development in work life cycle.

The Culture of Japanese Fascism (review)

Reviewed by: The Culture of Japanese Fascism Bill Mihalopoulos The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Edited by Alan Tansman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. 496 pp. $99.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). The Culture of Japanese Fascism is a multidisciplinary collection of essays dealing with the relation between aesthetics—as a critique of experience and "the true situation of the present"—and political action. The common thread among the diverse collection of essays is the starting point of analysis: Japan's fascist turn was a product of efforts to come to terms with "modernity." Japanese intellectuals experienced the shock of rapid change as a fundamental homesickness for a past when the world was fully accessible, and the transparency in human relations safeguarded Japanese civilization from outside corruption. In an effort to overturn the forces of modernity responsible for the present-day corruption and degenerate forms of life, Japanese thinkers, rural leaders, and social reformers turned to culture and community as a solution. Culture and tradition were conceptualized as the storehouses of an unchanging, transhistorical Japanese essence. In terms of aesthetics, culture and tradition were the elixir to prevent Japan turning into an inferior copy of the West. Politically, culture and the tradition held the key for Japan's quest to liberate Asia from Western colonial hegemony. More or less, each essay deals with a core issue in Japan's fascistic turn: how to revert to the premodern unity of ethics, politics, and economics. Capitalist development brought a rupture from the past. Precapitalist Japan was organized around direct interpersonal relations. Capitalism (re)organizes society impersonally, by means of the market, transforming labor power into production power. Capitalist modernity also undermined existing bonds of solidarity. Politics and economics no longer constituted a coherent whole. The intensification and spread of commodity relations from the mid 1900s transformed the outer and inner life of Japanese society. After the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese economy shifted from state-sponsored projects aimed at beefing up military and technological infrastructure to commodity production. The transformation to a higher level of capitalist production brought [End Page 893] about a significant transformation in social agency, as the wealth of objects and the knowledge and aspirations that constituted the lived world became subsumed under the capitalist principle of money begetting more money. The multiple new forms of life unleashed by the forces of commodity production transformed simultaneously the mind and material world: human social relations were objectified into things, and consciousness (the realm of judgment and value) was subjected to the principles of rationalization that constitute the world of commodities. That is to say, capitalist development involved the concurrent transformations in relations of production and subjectivity. This transformation led to a crisis of government. Namely, Japanese leaders had to invent new ways of governing to coordinate a whole field of new realities and multiplication of interests that threatened to tear Japan apart. What each essay reveals is a snapshot of how Japan's fascist turn is the gradual evolvement of heterogeneous forms of government, often conflicting, that intervened deep in everyday life, aiming to constitute a uniformed subjectivity. The vapor-like quality of fascism was due to the micro-level alignments of everyday choices and personal investments to the power circuits of the state. The Culture of Japanese Fascism is enriched by a tension between three distinct strands in analyzing fascism. Kevin Doak, Aaron Gerow, Noriko Aso, and Aaron Skabelund attempt to situate fascist ideals as a cultural manifestation of ethnic ultranationalism. Harry Harootunian, Michael Baskett, and Angus Lockyer are more interested in fascist aesthetics as a transnational movement where Japan's turn to ethical and cultural exceptionalism is an effect of capitalism. This approach posits an important point of debate that needs clarification. In this approach, fascism does not refer to the state fascism of Mussolini but to a generic authoritarian propensity immanent in capitalist societies. This propensity, or force, comes to the fore in times of crisis. During times of danger, diverse institutions in capitalist societies, such as school, family, police, and religious institutions become despotic and limit individual and collective action by demanding that one and sundry act and behave like "responsible" citizens, or, in the...

Capturing context for heterogeneous corpus analysis

Heterogeneous corpora are emergent multi-modal datasets which comprise a variety of different records of everyday communication, from SMS/MMS messages to interactions in virtual environments, and from GPS data to phone and video calls. By tracking a person’s specific (inter)actions over time and place, the analysis of such “ubiquitous” corpora enables more detailed investigations of the interface between different communicative modes. This paper outlines some of the ways in which multi-modal, heterogeneous corpora can be utilised in corpus-based analyses of language-in-use and how we can construct richer descriptions of language use in relation to context. The paper further illustrates how the compilation of such corpora may enable us to extrapolate further information about communication across different speakers, media and environments, helping to generate useful insights into the extent to which everyday language and communicative choices are determined by different spatial, temporal and social contexts.

Consumers can make decisions in as little as a third of a second

AbstractWe make hundreds of decisions every day, many of them extremely quickly and without much explicit deliberation. This motivates two important open questions: What is the minimum time required to make choices with above chance accuracy? What is the impact of additional decision-making time on choice accuracy? We investigated these questions in four experiments in which subjects made binary food choices using saccadic or manual responses, under either “speed” or “accuracy” instructions. Subjects were able to make above chance decisions in as little as 313 ms, and choose their preferred food item in over 70% of trials at average speeds of 404 ms. Further, slowing down their responses by either asking them explicitly to be confident about their choices, or to respond with hand movements, generated about a 10% increase in accuracy. Together, these results suggest that consumers can make accurate every-day choices, akin to those made in a grocery store, at significantly faster speeds than previously reported.

Equal Regard, Just Love, and Family Fairness: The Theories in Practice

Theoretical discussions by practical theologians of mutuality and justice-love in marriage and family life provide important insights and offer helpful guidance for Christians and others seeking to grow in love in their marriage and family life. However, it is contended that the question of the practical utility of some of the leading works has not been sufficiently explored. In order to make a contribution to this task, two case studies involving issues of mutuality and fairness are analyzed using the principles that leading theorists develop. It is concluded that incorporating a high level of specificity and concreteness into a theoretical model is required to assist married persons in dealing appropriately with everyday dilemmas and choices as they attempt to structure their family life around the principles of mutuality and justice-love.

As China goes, so goes the world: how Chinese consumers are transforming everything

In this revelatory examination of the most overlooked force that is changing the face of China, the Oxford historian and scholar of modern Asia Karl Gerth shows that as the Chinese consumer goes, so goes the world. While Americans and Europeans have become increasingly worried about China's competition for manufacturing jobs and energy resources, they have overlooked an even bigger story: China's rapid development of an American-style consumer culture, which is revolutionizing the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese and has the potential to reshape the world. This change is already well under way. China has become the world's largest consumer of everything from automobiles to beer and has begun to adopt such consumer habits as living in large single-occupancy homes, shopping in gigantic malls, and eating meat-based diets served in fast-food outlets. Even rural Chinese, long the laggards of consumerism, have been buying refrigerators, televisions, mobile phones, and larger houses in unprecedented numbers. As China Goes, So Goes the World reveals why we should all care about the everyday choices made by ordinary Chinese. Taken together, these seemingly small changes are deeper and more profound than the headline-grabbing stories on military budgets, carbon emissions, or trade disputes.

Inclusion and healthcare choices: the experiences of adults with learning disabilities

Accessible summary People with learning disabilities do not get to make as many choices as other people. This project looked at the choices people make about everyday things and about health services. We spoke to people with learning disabilities, their carers and Physiotherapy staff. We found that people with a learning disability were making choices about everyday things but felt that other people made choices about health services for them. We found that carers and healthcare staff need support to understand how difficult it can be to make choices, and how they can help people with a learning disability to make choices. SummaryPeople with learning disabilities have fewer choice opportunities than the general population. Existing research provides some insight, but the choice‐making experiences of those who do not always utilise available healthcare remains under‐explored. This research explored the choice‐making experiences of two groups of individuals with a learning disability: (Group 1 – Irregular attenders) those who had opted out of healthcare appointments for avoidable reasons; and (Group 2 – Regular attenders) those who had attended all appointments or not attended for unavoidable reasons. Interviews were carried out with people with learning disabilities (N = 4) and/or their primary carer (N = 13). In addition to these interviews, Physiotherapy staff participated in a focus group (Group 3). The interviewed individuals with learning disabilities described experiences of and opportunities for making everyday choices but generally identified ‘others’ as being responsible for making their healthcare choices. Greater understanding of the healthcare expectations and experiences of individuals with learning disabilities, carers and healthcare staff is required to support people with learning disabilities as active healthcare decision‐makers.

Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom

Readers of this journal are familiar enough with the environmental facts: human demand for resources and production of wastes exceeds the planet’s sustainable capacity, which portends future scarcity and potential calamity as resource stocks are depleted and pollution accumulates beyond dangerous thresholds. Deforestation decimates species habitats, industrialization intensiaes patterns of resource depletion and pollution, sprawl pushes the urbanwildland interface ever deeper into remaining undeveloped areas, and climate change threatens to exacerbate all these problems and more. Readers are also familiar with social scientiac analyses of the causes of such degradation and obstacles to its reform: the limited time horizons and regulatory incapacity of existing political institutions, social norms that encourage unsustainable consumption, collective action logic that undermines environmental responsibility, and the lack of reliable information concerning the environmental impacts of everyday choices all frustrate individual and collective efforts to live more sustainably. From such dismal projections, environmental politics is often caught between the pessimistic defeatism of those recommending unpalatable and unheeded solutions as the only means for averting ecological collapse, the futile jeremiads of those warding off apocalypse with compact ouorescent bulbs, and the naive optimism of the eco-pollyanna. Readers cycle between hoping against reason that the latter are somehow right and fearing against better regard for humanity that the former might be. A middle way is desperately needed, wherein hard-nosed realism about current threats and obstacles to meaningful change

A alimentação no contexto contemporâneo: consumo, ação política e sustentabilidade

The interdisciplinary field of reflections on food as politics goes through a process of expansion and overflow to the private sphere, and routine daily food consumption. This process seems to be a reflection of transformations in the global agrifood markets, the wide publicity and awareness of food hazards and the politicization of consumption. To the extent that individuals are to assume responsibility for the environmental and social consequences of their everyday choices, the specificity of political power in contemporary societies goes beyond the institutional level (food security and nutrition, social inequalities in access to food, agricultural policies and regulations advertising of food) to meet the private sphere. This paper shows, initially, some of the recent debates about the process of politicization of consumption and then explores a theoretical reflection on the ethical, political and ideological habits that relate to food consumption, including the locations and ways of acquiring and food preparation, the values of environmental preservation, solidarity with local producers and reflexive caution against food risks. Finally, points to a research agenda capable of capturing the processes of politicization of food and consumer practices in the field of political power.

Development of a nutrition knowledge questionnaire for obese adults

Background and objectiveThe aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire for assessing nutritional knowledge among overweight adults. The questionnaire should reveal knowledge about current dietary recommendations, sources of nutrients, everyday food choices, and conditions related to overweight.DesignThe first draft of the nutrition knowledge questionnaire (113 items) was based on literature review. To ensure content validity and expert-assessed face validity, an expert panel examined the questionnaire. Thereafter, the questionnaire was tested for user friendliness and ambiguity by five students. The questionnaire was pilot tested in a group of obese adults, similar to the target group. The results were analyzed for item difficulty and internal consistency and comments made by respondents were taken into account. Two student groups, differing in nutritional expertise, answered the questionnaire on two occasions to test construct validity and test–retest reliability. After the retest, a total overview of the questionnaire was made by the expert panel. The final questionnaire consisted of 91 items.SubjectsThe pilot study was conducted in obese adults waiting for a gastric bypass operation (n=33). Construct validity (n=34) and test–retest reliability (n=27) was tested in two student groups: public health nutrition students and construction students.ResultsResults from the pilot study showed that internal consistency of the three first sections together was 0.84, measured by Cronbach's α. Test of construct validity showed that public health nutrition students scored significantly better than construction students (p<0.001 for all sections), and test–retest reliability for all sections together was 0.82 (Pearson's r).ConclusionThe knowledge questionnaire had reasonable content-, face-, and construct validities and overall good reliability. The questionnaire can be a useful tool for measuring nutrition knowledge among obese adults.

Futures 2.0: rethinking the discipline

Purpose – This paper seeks to be a thought experiment. If the field of futures were invented today, it asks, what would it look like? What would be its intellectual foundations? Who would it serve and influence? And how would its ideas and insights be put into practice?Design/methodology/approach – It reviews the literatures on experimental psychology and neuroscience to identify biases that affect people's ability to think about and act upon the future, studies of expertise that map the limits of professional judgment, and recent work on the nature of critical challenges of the twenty‐first century.Findings – It argues that futurists could develop social software tools, prediction markets, and other technologies to improve the individual and collective accuracy and impact of work. Choice architectures and nudges to lengthen “the shadow of the future” of everyday choices made by ordinary people could also be used.Research limitations/implications – The paper argues for new directions in the practice of fu...

Power and Pragmatics

AbstractLanguage is an important means through which power relations are created and negotiated. In addition to everyday choices speakers make about their own language use, variations in ways of talking are related to local theories of power, status, identity, self, ethnicity, class, and gender. Grammatical and lexical choices, choices in forms of address and reference, turn‐taking, narratives of cause and effect, genre, and stylistic performance, as well as the organization of space for talk and participation, embodied behaviors, and silence are used as elements in the distribution of power. Power and language are connected through the marking of certain encounters and contexts as requiring particular types of language use, the privileging of certain types of language, who may or may not speak in certain settings, which contexts are appropriate for which types of speech and which for silence, what types of talk are appropriate to persons of different statuses and roles, norms for requesting and giving information, and practices for alternating between speakers. Pragmatic uses of language are an important tool for constructing social difference and distinctions between individuals in terms of efficacy and power.

Deciding without Resources: Resource Depletion and Choice in Context

Although choices can occur after careful deliberation, many everyday choices are usually effortless and are guided by intuitive thinking. This research examines the implications of the interplay between these two types of decision processes for context effects in choice by exploring the consequences of the depletion of executive resources in a prior, unrelated task. Building on a substantial body of psychological literature that points to a single underlying resource used for self-regulation and executive control, this article demonstrates that resource depletion has a systematic influence on choice in context. Specifically, resource depletion enhances the role of intuitive reasoning by impairing deliberate, careful processing. In five experiments, the authors find that resource depletion increases the share of reference-dependent choices, decreases the compromise effect, and magnifies the attraction effect. The results shed light on the mechanisms underlying context effects in choice and suggest that the scope of the depleted resource is not constrained to self-regulation activities but rather extends to choice in general.

Person-Centered Planning Made Easy, by S. Holburn, A. Gordon, and P. M. Vietze

Person-Centered Planning Made Easy, by S. Holburn, A. Gordon, and P. M. Vietze

Everyday revolutions: eighteenth-century women transforming public and private

Women's everyday choices can engender revolutionary acts. This collection gathers essays that build upon this premise and go beyond the Habermassian public/private paradigm to examine the ways in which eighteenth-century women defied not only the restrictions their own culture sought to enforce, but also the restrictions our historical and literary understandings have created. While recent studies have linked women to public activity by looking at revolutionary moments, such work often implies that those moments were just that: isolated moments within a framework of repression, containment, and silencing. These essays demonstrate how women of the period were not circumscribed to precious revolutionary moments but rather were participants in a web of acts, ranging in scale, that contributed to the emergence of a rich cultural dialogue still vibrant today.These essays contest tenacious misconceptions about women's activities and abilities and revise a powerful account of the development and nature of the public and private spheres. The contributors show that eighteenth-century women's everyday lives challenged cultural expectations about the restrictions on the female role; women's everyday participation in activities like work and politics rejected notions about women's domesticity and privacy. Our recognition of women's everyday revolutionary behavior revises the way we understand the history of the public sphere and of the separation of spheres. The public/private paradigm, despite its discursive power, did not operate in monolithic fashion but could be manipulated and inflected in various ways to allow for and empower many kinds of action and agency in public and in private.

Reward, emotion and consumer choice: from neuroeconomics to neurophilosophy

Abstract Neuroeconomics has found no definitive role in the explanation of consumer choice and its undeveloped philosophical basis limits its attempt to explain economic behaviour. The nature of neuroeconomics is explored, especially with respect to what it reveals about the valuation of alternatives, choice and emotion. The tendency of human consumers to discount future rewards illustrates how behavioural and neuroscientific accounts of choice contribute to psychological explanations of choice and the issues this raises for both routine everyday choices and more extreme compulsions. Central to this is the phenomenon of matching in which consumers tend to select the immediately larger or largest reward and the neurophysiological and behavioural bases of this choice. Recognition that rewards are evoked by reinforcement contingencies and that the rewards themselves engender emotional responses via classical conditioning enhances understanding the contribution of neurological activity to the explanation of consumer behaviour. It is argued that neuroeconomics can play a vital explanatory role by providing an evolutionarily consistent warrant for the ascription of intentionality. The Behavioural Perspective Model is used as a template for investigations of consumer choice that lead to iterative theoretical development, forming the basis of a neurophilosophy in which neuroeconomics can find a decisive role. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Pregnancy, Fertility, and Contraception Risk in the Context of Chronic Disease

Chronic health conditions complicate everyday choices patients make regarding their health and reproductive options. The risks and possible complications of existing conditions should be clearly communicated to patients so they can make informed decisions regarding their care. This compilation of 4 articles presents the fertility, infertility, and contraceptive challenges faced by individuals living with 4 common chronic conditions: systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, scoliosis, and organ transplant history. The article centers on reproductive concerns and risks facing both men and women affected by these disorders. It is critical that clinicians be aware of the unique issues these patients face so that appropriate education and counseling can be provided. These articles provide a basic understanding of the issues and concerns for these 4 chronic conditions.