Way Of Life Research Articles

Digital healthcare technology adoption by elderly people: A capability approach model

Digital technologies, such as online healthcare portals, enable elderly people to live independently at home for a longer period of time. Independent living, in this context, refers to the freedom elderly people have to live their lives in ways that they find important. Borrowing from the capability approach (CA) framework from Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, the core argument of this paper is that elderly people make decisions on whether to use digital healthcare technologies by considering how these technologies enhance their capabilities to live their lives in ways that are valuable to them. This paper develops a theoretical model of adoption of digital healthcare technologies that support independent living applying the CA framework. We follow a mixed-methods approach with a sequence of qualitative, quantitative, and qualitative methods. We find support for our theoretical model, specifically that the intention to use online healthcare portals depends on whether elderly people expect to enhance their capabilities for living independently by using them. Our study contributes to the information systems literature on adoption of digital healthcare technologies as it is the first that applies the capability approach. For adoption studies on digital technologies in healthcare and beyond, our study poses two major theoretical implications: (1) when considering how outcome expectations affect adoption, scholars should consider how digital technologies allow people to live their lives in ways that are valuable to them, rather than considering how technologies help to execute predefined tasks, jobs, or activities; (2) the availability of digital technologies should be considered as a mediator between outcome expectations and intention to use technologies.

Transnormativity in the psy disciplines: Constructing pathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and Standards of Care.

The psy disciplines (i.e., psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy) have played a significant role in shaping understandings of transgender people's lives in ways that are transnormative (i.e., by emphasizing one particular account of what it means to be transgender). This article documents (a) how the rise of the psy disciplines created opportunities for transgender people to access treatment (but that such access often required tacit acceptance of transnormativity), and (b) how transgender people have resisted transnormative accounts within the psy disciplines. More specifically, this article explores how both the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and what is now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's Standards of Care, have often enshrined highly regulatory accounts of transgender people's lives, while also changing over time, in part as a result of the contributions of transgender people. The article concludes by considering recent contributions by transgender people in terms of the use of informed consent models of care and clinical research, and highlights the ongoing marginalization of transgender people in terms of access to ethical, transcompetent care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Children’s Technology Time in Two US Cohorts

Over the last two decades, technologies available to children have accelerated with the advent of wireless internet and increasing portability and affordability of electronic devices. Children’s technology use is a rapidly evolving challenge for families, organizing their everyday lives and potentially resulting in social disparities in technology use and displacement of healthy behaviors. This study examined time spent on technology use, physical activity, play, and sleep by US children across early (ages 2–5) and middle (ages 6–11) childhood in two cohorts using time diary data with a focus on variation by class and race. Data came from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement in 1997 (N = 2193) and 2014–2016 (N = 1009). Multivariate regression models estimated total time spent engaged in technology use, physical activity, unstructured play, and sleep. Total time spent engaged with technology increased 32% since 1997 in early childhood and 23% in middle childhood. Technology use was lowest for children with the most highly educated parents. In the more recent cohort, technology use was associated with displacement of physical activity in middle childhood but with increased play in early childhood and increased sleep in middle childhood. Results suggest that changes over time in technology use have restructured children’s everyday lives in ways that may be consequential for health and development, but co-occurring declines in physical activity and unstructured play cannot be attributed solely to technology time.

Os banquetes do Yaokwa: potencialidades e limites do cinema e do património entre os Enawenê-nawê

O artigo examina a utilização do cinema em processos de patrimonialização não institucional e institucional do ritual Yaokwa do povo Enawenê-nawê em dois momentos históricos diferentes, recorrendo a depoimentos de cineastas e antropólogos indigenistas, à análise fílmica e a bibliografia ameríndia. As obras foram produzidas pelo projeto Vídeo nas Aldeias que, desde os anos 1980, desenvolve um trabalho colaborativo com comunidades indígenas na área do audiovisual. O primeiro documentário foi realizado num contexto de reflexão interna sobre a relação a estabelecer com a sociedade colonial. O segundo filme foi produzido quinze anos depois como parte do processo de patrimonialização institucional do ritual Yaokwa que tinha como objetivo alertar para os desafios ambientais que vários empreendimentos capitalistas colocavam à manutenção do modo de vida dos Enawenê-nawê.

"Like a Normal Person Again": A Qualitative Analysis of the Impact of Headache Surgery.

Outcomes after migraine surgery have been previously assessed using quantitative measurements, including the migraine headache index. Qualitative methodologies offer the ability to analyze patients' perceptions and pain experience, and may point to changes in domains not captured by quantitative instruments. The purpose of this study was to characterize individual patients' experiences with migraines and to analyze how patients' experience of headaches changes in relation to surgery. Patients who previously underwent migraine surgery performed by a single surgeon participated in semistructured interviews at least 1 year after surgery. Purposive sampling was used to recruit patients [n = 15 (73 percent female)]. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. A multidisciplinary team with backgrounds in surgery, pain management, medicine, and health services research coded and analyzed transcripts. Participants reported improvements in one or more domains of pain following surgery, and changes in medication use and effectiveness. Even in individuals with persistent pain postoperatively, surgery appeared to facilitate an improvement in headache self-efficacy, including an ability to participate in daily activities. Migraineurs frequently described a new degree of control over at least one aspect of their pain. Migraine surgery appears to positively impact patients' lives in ways that support and expand on previously published outcomes. Patients report benefiting from surgery in ways that are not currently captured in commonly used metrics. This study's findings support the need for more specific patient-reported outcome measures to help clinicians and patients understand the impact of surgery and which outcomes matter most to patients.

Benefits and challenges of pastoralism system in Ethiopia

Pastoralism is an important livelihood system practice in most of the dryland areas of the globe.It is a source of income and way of livelihood for hundreds of millions of world population.This research aimed at explaining the benefits of pastoral system, identifying the main challenges the sector faced based on secondary data obtained from different official records such as FAO, CSA (Central Statistical Authority of Ethiopia) and published research article and government reports. Besides this, this research also tried to indicate the possible way outs. Economically it contributes about 10%-40% of national GDP of countries and over 1.3 billion people benefited from the livestock value chain. Ethiopia has the largest livestock population in Africa (first in Africa, and 5th in the world) and 20 % of the national export and 90% of live animal export of the Ethiopian trade, and 80% of annual milk supply to the Ethiopian community resulted directly from the pastoralists. Yet the sectorial contribution has many bottlenecks and the most important one is lack of appropriate policy due to the misconception that the system is economically not feasible and environmentally unfriendly. In addition to this, unexpected, but short period drought and weak market chain, limited access to feed, equipment and information, market chain, animal health (veterinary) are contributing factors to the low contribution of the livestock sector. Ethiopia, with its huge livestock population and the increasing demand of global meat and milk demand, should give attention towards the sectorial development including provision of infrastructure such as milk and milk processing industries, leather and leather processing industries, and focus on Diversification of economic activities inthe pastoral areas. Besides, the government of Ethiopia should give an emphasis on developing policies and strategies to increase productivity of livestock and maintain the development of the sector. Furthermore, the government should devise mechanisms to control the illegal inter-boarder live animal export and way of measuring unaccounted (nonmarketable) values of livestock pastoral contributions.

Teungku Sum’s dilemma: Ethical time, reflexivity, and the Islamic everyday

This article analyzes a dilemma faced by a young religious teacher in the Indonesian province of Aceh—namely, whether to continue teaching in an Islamic boarding school or to find more lucrative work elsewhere so that he can pursue a spouse. It argues that the way this teacher poses this dilemma as a choice between two mutually exclusive ethical goods makes visible an Islamic everyday constituted by different kinds and degrees of reflective awareness. This Islamic everyday brings different models of Islamic time to bear upon the details of a life in ways that frame multiple, and sometimes competing, accounts of self. In so doing, it challenges a distinction between Islam and the everyday that has been central in the anthropology of Islam.

Group Farming -Sustainable Way of Livelihood

Group Farming -Sustainable Way of Livelihood

Mutual Friends: Travel and Networks After the First World War

Social and cultural histories of the enduring effects of the First World War have, understandably, focused on trauma, bereavement and disability. Other effects that might arguably be regarded as positive – those that resulted from exposure to a broad range of people in a global and multi-ethnic, multi-religious event – have not only been more difficult to trace, but are possibly less palatable in modern rememberings of war. This article uses two travel diaries by veterans of the New Zealand forces to observe the ways First World War experiences continued to impact their lives in ways that were not traumatic. Rather, for years and decades after the First World War, the experiences of these two travellers were enriched and their horizons expanded by the people met and networks formed in the 1914–18 conflict.

Confessions and Tweets: Social Media and Everyday Experience in the Israel Defense Forces

This article explores the social media postings of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers on two different and unofficial Facebook groups. While scholars of armed forces and society have noted the growing importance that militaries have placed on digital media, there is little data regarding the unofficial uses and meanings that regular soldiers themselves make of social networking sites. With an anthropological focus on everyday experiences, we argue that the social media activity of IDF personnel highlights the quotidian aspects of military life in ways that reverberate beyond the strictly ideological or political facets of their service. Here, soldiers can express their frustrations with military bureaucracy, while also presenting a lighthearted (and positive) commentary on a shared rite of passage. This research opens a window into the lives and dilemmas of the first generation of Israeli soldiers to employ new media as a taken for granted aspect of their service.

Peer relationships at residential care institutions for unaccompanied refugee minors: An under-utilised resource?

Without access to their own families, how do young, unaccompanied refugee minors re-establish their social lives in ways that facilitate a sense of togetherness in their everyday lives during resettlement? This question was approached by exploring the young persons’ creation of relational practices and the kinds of sociomaterial conditions that seemed to facilitate the evolvement of these practices, including the professional caregivers’ contributions. Interviews with 11 boys and 4 girls (aged 13–16) from Afghanistan, Somalia, Angola and Sri Lanka, as well as their professional caregivers in their country of residence, Norway, were analysed systematically by searching for, and categorizing, the variation of relational practices among the young persons. Three overarching practices are presented. First, the young persons worked to connect past, present and future contexts through collective meaning-making practices. Second, they regulated their peers’ emotions through emotional care practices. Third, they widened each other’s social networks through practices of social inclusion. Following the resettlement procedure the young persons moved from one kind of institution (care centre) to other parts of the country and to another kind of institution (group home) where the relational practices mentioned above appeared to be less prevalent. The article suggests that arranging everyday life as collective enterprises, as well as housing peers with similar cultural backgrounds, were central for the evolvement of the relational practices. As such, the article both elucidates a range of health-promoting relational practices that the young persons’ realised as a group as well as how these practices are embedded in sociomaterial conditions.

Fermenting Communications: Fermentation Praxis as Interspecies Communication

Microbes are in, on, and around us at all times, yet we cannot easily communicate with them. How do we (continue to) live with microbial life in ways that allow for our mutual thriving? Using a performative lens, this paper analyzes the material practices of fermentation as a way of connecting with different scales of life. It attempts to challenge conventional understandings of communications (e.g. encoding/decoding models put forth by Stuart Hall) by examining the layered manner in which fermentation engages with matter and meaning. The material practices of fermentation require embodied knowledge to work with microbial life, and the discursive considerations of fermentation challenge anthropocentric thought. Thus, materially and discursively, fermentation functions as a continual form of engagement. Thought of as a form of communication, fermentation helps us to consider some of the invisible relations we have with microbes and connect with micro-species we often take for granted.

Fermenting Communications: Fermentation Praxis as Interspecies Communication

Microbes are in, on, and around us at all times, yet we cannot easily communicate with them. How do we (continue to) live with microbial life in ways that allow for our mutual thriving? Using a performative lens, this paper analyzes the material practices of fermentation as a way of connecting with different scales of life. It attempts to challenge conventional understandings of communications (e.g. encoding/decoding models put forth by Stuart Hall) by examining the layered manner in which fermentation engages with matter and meaning. The material practices of fermentation require embodied knowledge to work with microbial life, and the discursive considerations of fermentation challenge anthropocentric thought. Thus, materially and discursively, fermentation functions as a continual form of engagement. Thought of as a form of communication, fermentation helps us to consider some of the invisible relations we have with microbes and connect with micro-species we often take for granted.

Transgenerational associations between maternal childhood stress exposure and profiles of infant emotional reactivity.

Childhood exposure to stress can induce prolonged negative effects on health, which in turn confer risks for the next generation, but greater specificity is needed to inform intervention. A first step is to measure individual differences in emotional reactivity to stress early in life in ways that can account for heterogeneity in child exposure. The present study tested the hypothesis that mothers' childhood exposure to stress would be differentially associated with patterns of positive and negative emotional reactivity in their offspring, suggesting transmission of stress response across generations. Participants were 268 young mothers (age 14-23 years) followed longitudinally since childhood, and their infants aged 3-9 months. Latent class analysis of infant emotions expressed before and during the still-face paradigm yielded five subgroups that varied in valence, intensity, and reactivity. After accounting for sociodemographic factors, infant temperament, and postpartum depression, multinomial regression models showed that, relative to an emotionally regulated still-face response, infants showing low negative reactivity were more likely to have mothers exposed to childhood emotional abuse, and infants showing high and increasing negative reactivity were more likely to have mothers exposed to childhood emotional neglect. Mechanisms by which early maternal stress exposure influences emotional reactivity in offspring are discussed.

Making sense of nuclear war: narratives of voluntary civil defence and the memory of Britain’s Cold War

ABSTRACTIn interviews with members of Britain’s Civil Defence Services, experiences of Cold War voluntarism are recalled in different ways. Some remembered their desire to help defend their nation and local community. Others remembered making a leisure choice that had little connection to the potential nuclear war the organization was ostensibly preparing for. No one provided a well-developed account of civil defence’s ability to provide a defence against the effects of a nuclear war. Popular memory theorists suggest cultural discourse limits the ability of individuals to narrate stories that do not align with culturally valued frameworks: in this case, dominant understandings of civil defence as at best ridiculous or at worst dangerous were established in the 1980s. This article argues that memories of civil defence voluntarism in the 1950-60s have been shaped by these discourses, but that individuals were able to express the different meanings civil defence had in their lives in ways that provide a more nuanced and holistic picture of the intersections of leisure, service and sociability that made up civil defence. As such, it argues that oral history allows us to understand the various ‘horizons of possibility’ that made up individual experiences of the Cold War.

Morris , Jeremy Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins (review)

REVIEWS 393 feeds off and into a similar sentiment in Western Europe (Brexit, Lega Nord in Italy, Alternative for Germany, etc.). This, however, is less a minor quibble and more an anticipatory look to future work from Dzenovska. In the meanwhile, her masterful book belongs on the shelves of academics from many disciplines. University of Washington Aldis Purs Morris, Jeremy. Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016. xxvii + 261 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. References. Index. £66.99. Political scientists and sociologists have created significant knowledge about policy and its effects in contemporary Russia. But theoretically-robust and engagingly-descriptive ethnography is a different and arguably more difficult category of scholarship. Jeremy Morris triumphantly pulls off the achievement in his excellent book, Everyday Post-Socialism. He focuses on a small industrial town in Kaluga Region. This is a former ‘monotown’. In the Soviet period, it grew up around quarries. It was a small centre for the manufacturing of cement and products associated with road construction. Now it contains various ‘inheritor’ industries, including foreign car manufacture and plastics, as well as numerous independent firms and a thriving informal sector. Morris’s book takes us inside this community. It analyses provincial working-class identity in terms of employment, the informal economy, gender and generation. Morris has already written widely about post-Soviet ‘informality’, the ways in which personal ties, as well as flexible relations to administration, regulation and the law structure much of working-class identity and economic survival strategies. This is one of several theoretical frameworks that support the empirical material. Another is the concept of habitability, or how people have organized their lives in ways that make existence bearable and sufficient. Pursuing this organizing principle allows Morris to throw light on the everyday practices of people’s lives. But it also implies a population living independently from neoliberal discourses of deracinated personal ambition. Instead, a web of personal connections and practices allow people to survive, modestly to get on — and act too as the sources of a partly class-based identity that provides consolations that go beyond the immediately material. The Soviet Union was the workers’ state and some categories of manual labour were especially privileged in terms of wages and public celebration. For some, it was possible to be a manual worker and consider oneself a significant person in a way that is impossible in a capitalist economy. Even thirty years later, manual work SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 394 continues to shape not just the economies of some post-Soviet towns but also the inner lives of many post-socialist Russians. In facing this reality, Morris takes his subjects seriously, not simply as anonymous case studies or statistical data, but as persons with as much richness and dignity as members of higher social groups. Morris’s ethnographic approach is an immersive one. It rests on many visits to the township both in the 1990s and more recently, during which he lived, socialized and worked alongside selected members of this working-class community. Inevitably, there is a self-selecting quality to some of the empirical base that results. The conclusions rest on lengthy and repeated encounters with relatively small numbers of informants, rather than more superficial interviews with a larger and more representative field. But Morris lives in the homes of some of these people, becomes part of their social circles, visits them at work, drinks with others, and spends long hours helping them with sophisticated DIY, modestly describing his sometimes hapless contributions. What this amounts to is a detailed, compelling and convincing description of a crucial layer of contemporary Russian civilization. The book transcends its field. Anyone who is interested in Russia can find it enjoyable and useful, as can scholars with a cognate theoretical focus or an interest in the wider post-socialist region. Historians, of whom I am one, will learn from its approach to historical time in the present and immediate past. Unlike many works of social science, it does not simply offer a snapshot of an abstracted present, or make a nod to chronological context, but creates a more careful sense of how people and place relate to...

Possible Effects of Social Science Measuring and Measurements on Persons Measured and Unmeasured: Reactivity

Believing one or persons like one are being, were, or will be measured on some social or psychological dimension and by whom may influence how one participates in being measured or otherwise lives one’s life in ways that affect one’s such measurements and their generalizability. Believing that one knows one’s own or certain others such measurements also may. Therefore the social sciences need to detect, avoid, and overcome these problems of reactivity to their measuring and measurements if they are to obtain valid measurements and generalizations from these. This requires the cooperation of the measured and so an understanding of the social psychology of measuring on such dimensions, of how persons participate in being measured on such dimensions and react to being informed about their own or some others measurements on these dimensions. These are matters that physical science measurement theory has no reason to be concerned with, is not, and so cannot properly provide a model for measurement of persons on social science dimensions.

Sources of Friendship and Structurally Induced Homophily across the Life Course

How people meet new friends changes throughout life in ways that change the potential for diverse friendships. This study presents results from the first U.S. survey with data on how respondents met their friends, specifically the two nonfamily friends they most often socialize with. The most common sources of new friendships shift across life from the dominance of schooling during youth, to the centrality of work in midlife, to neighbors and voluntary groups in later life. Educational homophily peaks for friendships made in midlife, and is strongest for friendships made in higher education and at work. Racial homophily generally declines as people age but is lowest for men in midlife, while decreasing later for women. Friendship sources largely account for life course changes in racial homophily, but not educational homophily. The racial homophily induced by friendship sources also changes as people age, but in different ways for women and men.

Western ‘Civic Totalism’, Sovereignty of the People, and the Need for Limited Government

In a fascinating, comparative philosophical article, Sungmoon Kim attempts ‘to revamp Confucian democracy, which is originally presented as the communitarian corrective and cultural alternative to liberal democracy, into a robust democratic political theory and practice that is plausible in the societal context of pluralism’. The same source of inspiration that Kim uses to reconstruct Confucian democracy – William Galston’s notion of liberal pluralism – can be used to critically appraise the current state of Western liberal democracy, to consider, more specifically, the extent to which Western liberal democracy still manages to realize the principle of expressive liberty, defined by Galston as ‘the absence of constraints, imposed by some individuals on others, that make it impossible (or significantly more difficult) for the affected individuals to live their lives in ways that express their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning or value to life’.

Situating Ethics in Online Mourning Research: A Scoping Review of Empirical Studies

In the past decade, social media have put mourning practices at the forefront of daily life in ways that challenge assumptions made about the public disclosure of information often construed as being highly intimate. This article examines how researchers conceive online mourning in empirical studies and how such conceptions inform (or not) methodological and ethical decisions. Through a scoping review, we identified 40 empirical papers addressing online mourning. Our analysis shows that, while online mourning practices have overwhelmingly been problematized in terms of privacy and publicness within the current literature, ethical issues relating to their analysis have been scarcely addressed in empirical research. In line with Foucault’s work on the dispositif, we then examine the performative role of privacy and data sensitivity in the context of online mourning research (notably in relation to consent procurement) and discuss our findings in light of emerging trends in context-based ethics.