Patterns Of Everyday Life Research Articles

Credibility of media offerings in centrally controlled media systems: a qualitative study based on the example of East Germany

Research on media use in authoritarian political systems supports the thesis that media offerings in such systems suffer from a low factor of credibility, leading to declining political interest within society, continuous retreat into the private sphere and heavy use of foreign media offerings in the search of trustworthy information. The literature indicates that both the political and centrally controlled media system have an impact on the communication needs of citizens. These findings are at odds with audience research into democratic societies, which has emphasized entertainment as the most important variable for media use, whereas only a few segments of the audience are interested in genuinely political items. This article argues that the above assumptions concerning media use in countries governed by authoritarian regimes have failed to recognize the role of daily life in media selection and reception. It points out that communication science has ignored citizens’ predominant desire for entertainment and over-estimated their need for information. The typology of East German media consumers presented in this article shows that, rather than being formed by the political system and a specific media landscape, people’s communication needs are primarily shaped by the routines and patterns of everyday life.

Time Geographic Method: Application to Studying Patterns of Occupation in Different Contexts

This article highlights a time‐geographic approach to understanding the temporal patterns of people's occupations and their relationship to health and illness. It outlines the use of diaries to gather data and proposes that this method makes it possible to study the everyday life context of individuals, capturing i) Activity contexts (everyday context and project context) ii) Geographic context iii) Social context and iv) Experiential context. The method has been used to gather information about activity patterns in everyday life, and further developed to identify health risks in a population and as a foundation for intervention in rehabilitation. Examples described are application of the method to promote change processes in a workplace and in a rehabilitation setting.

Women, Neighbourhoods and Everyday Life

The paper discusses everyday life in urban neighbourhoods from a feminist perspective. It aims to engage theoretically and through reference to research in progress with everyday life as a concept which brings to the foreground of enquiry the richness and variety of everyday experience and helps to approach urban life and urban development as 'peopled and gendered' processes. Everyday life is connected to places where women and men live, work, consume, relate to others, forge identities, cope with or challenge routine, habit and established codes of conduct-i.e. neighbourhoods, understood as one important urban spatiality, among many. In the context of geographical debate on space/place, the paper approaches neighbourhoods not as bounded places (although this is not absent from the urban experience), but rather as particular constellations of social relations, with local and supralocal determinants, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. In such constellations of relations, the intersecting patterns of everyday life of different women determine individual and collective identities and contribute to develop strategies which organise the everyday both as adaptation and recurrent small decisions and as particular practices and general priorities. In turn, adaptations and challenges are determined by urban spatialities and temporalities.

Asian Tigers: The Real, the Symbolic, the Commodity

In nature, tigers have existed only in Asia. Over the millennia, Asian peoples have had much interaction with tigers, and those experiences have come to influence the patterns of everyday life, especially for villagers. In short, humans and tigers have a long history in Asia. Through case studies of China, the Malay world, and India from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this article argues that Asian rulers used tigers—or more properly, their control of tigers—to enhance their political power, further the reach of central states, and inform their understanding of colonizing European powers.

“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model - based on self-interest - fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.

Meanings and Motives for Engagement in Self-Chosen Daily Life Occupations among Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease

The aim of this study was to uncover and describe the meanings and motives for engagement in self-chosen daily life occupations for elderly individuals with Alzheimer's disease dwelling in the community. Six participants with Alzheimer's disease were included. Data were collected through repeated interviews and observations focusing on their motives for their self-chosen occupational engagement and the significance of the daily occupations. The analysis used a qualitative comparative and interpretative method. The findings show that the participants' occupations supported their ordinary pattern of everyday life and provided them with an opportunity to be in a coherent context. The occupations also allowed them to experience and communicate autonomy and certain characteristics of their identity and provided them with a private sphere. The findings revealed certain crucial but double-edged environmental keys to occupation. By identifying and supporting everyday occupations with personal meaning and value, therapists and caregivers may contribute to the well-being of individuals with Alzheimer's disease living in their own homes.

Discourse and Diffusion

The article critically explores the different paths chosen by closely related historical disciplines: intellectual history and the history of books. While the former has focused on discourse analysis, the latter has given more attention to the study of diffusion. Historians who study the diffusion of books commonly run into a difficulty: the best-sellers of the past may serve as an indicator of public taste, but they may also be trivial, and they do not necessarily lead to explanations of important events such as the Reformation and the French Revolution. On the other hand, discourse analysis is confined to a narrow band of textual evidence, and thus cannot provide much insight on the values and views of ordinary people caught up in the patterns of everyday life. The author concludes by discussing how the history of books, particularly the history of reading and the history of publishing, can have important implications for the study of discourse.

Diffusion, Policy, and Use of Broadband in Japan

In Japan, information technology (IT) policies have undergone a fundamental change in recent years. Lower charges and faster access speed resulting from the market-oriented IT policies have caused the number of broadband users to grow rapidly. After reviewing broadband and IT policies, this paper focuses on the uses and effects of the broadband based on a nationally representative survey. The survey results demonstrate that early adopters of the broadband are demographically different from their counterpart using the narrowband, which suggests that diffusion of the broadband will reduce the existing demographic gaps in Internet use. The results also demonstrate that broadband use significantly increased the amount of time spent on the Internet, reduced the amount of time spent watching TV, and promoted advanced usage of the Internet. These results suggest that the broadband Internet as a powerful time-consuming medium may change time use patterns of everyday life.

The microscopist of modern life.

This is an essay in the history of observation of the natural and social worlds. It explores how nineteenth-century Paris became a field and object of scientific observation and how the everyday lives, and even the health, of scientists living in the city and leaving the city for the "country" modeled observations and theoretical interpretation. The story concerns the first important work in the research school of Louis Pasteur to focus on a human and urban disease, diphtheria, rather than animal and rural ones. An urban field practice emerged from characteristically Parisian forms and literary fictions of street life and public space, leisure, spectacle, and crowds. Some of these, such as transcience, were (and still are) viewed as not only characteristic of "modern life," but also the source of new practices and sensibilities in painting and literature. Microbiological studies elsewhere --such as in New York and Hamburg--were based on very different urban structures, patterns of everyday life, national cultures, and aspects of modernity.

The Experience of Respite during Home-Based Family Caregiving for Persons with Advanced Cancer

The purpose of this qualitative interpretive study was to explore the experience of respite during home-based family caregiving for persons with advanced cancer. Fifteen caregivers were interviewed twice after the death of their family member. Three main themes emerged from the data analysis. First, caring for a dying family member at home is an emotionally intense, exhausting, and singular experience, set in a world apart from everyday life patterns. Second, the caregivers differentiated between cognitive breaks and physical (getting away from) breaks of respite. To achieve a cognitive break and yet remain within the caregiving environment was viewed as important, whereas the physical separation from it was significant only if it contributed in some meaningful way to the caregiving. Third, the meaning of respite is rooted in the desire to bring a measure of quality and normalcy to the life of the dying person. Respite means staying engaged in living life with the dying family member.

Neoliberalism, the State, and the Left: A Canadian Perspective

An assessment of the left today must begin with an analysis of neoliberalism. For over the past two decades neoliberalism has come to dominate public discourse and the modalities of the state in one country after another. The ascendancy of neoliberalism has occurred through a series of interconnected transformations that began with the economic turmoil of the 1970s, the rise of New Right governments across the 1980s, and the deepening internationalization of the circuits of money and industrial capital, modes of communication, and governance structures in the 1990s. Neoliberalism has come to mark a historic turning-point in the balance of power, the social forms of economic and political power, and the patterns of everyday life. From the perspective of the renewal of the left in Canada, and indeed North America, it is critical that we record the importance of this point and its many implications.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

La RDA dans la recherche historique allemande. De la « Seconde dictature » à l'histoire politique au quotidien

Sandrine Kott The GDR in German historical research : from the "Second Dictatorship" to a political history of daily life. The first works on the GDR were largely written in response to a social demand. The totalitarian approach has proven, in this context to be most powerful. But lately the research has became less political and has taken on new directions. Works using anthropological approaches and everyday life patterns are increasing in number and have revealed a lot about the reality of the German socialist regime.

In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies

We can summarize our results as follows. First, the canonical model is not supported in any society studied. Second, there is considerably more behavioral variability across groups than had been found in previous cross-cultural research, and the canonical model fails in a wider variety of ways than in previous experiments. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the degree of market integration explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation, the greater the level of cooperation in experimental games. Fourth, individual-level economic and demographic variables do not explain behavior either within or across groups. Fifth, behavior in the experiments is generally consistent with economic patterns of everyday life in these societies.

Practical logics: the shapes and lessons of popular medical knowledge and practice — examples from Vietnam and Indigenous Australia

Popular medical knowledge and practice exist in forms that people are able to remember, and that they use to manage their daily lives. This knowledge is fundamentally practical and relates to the patterns of everyday life and the rhythms of the body. The broad “polythetic” concepts of this knowledge system are typically drawn from both dominant and other medical knowledges, and combined in pragmatic, mnemonic ways that constitute a hybrid system. Such popular medical knowledge is attuned to local, family and cultural patterns of medical and other authority, and to the personal dispositions and environmental contexts of its users. Health promoters and educators who understand these formal, embodied and familiar dimensions of popular knowledge can potentially mimic this knowledge system, making their interventions a sustainable part of everyday family life.

The art of perception: from the life world to the medical gaze and back again.

Perceptions are often merely regarded as the basic elements of knowledge. They have, however, a complex structure of their own and are far from being elementary. My paper will analyze two basic patterns of perception and some of the resulting medical implications. Most basically, all object perception is characterized by a mixture of knowledge and ignorance (Husserl). Perception essentially perceives with inner and outer horizons, brought about by the kinesthetic activity of the perceiving subject (Sartre). This first layer of perceptual reality, the world of "open" perceptions, is the inescapable background for "every rationality, every value, every existence" (Merleau-Ponty). On an epistemological level a characteristic change of perceptual patterns in medicine was introduced by pathological anatomy (Foucault). The reference of medical perception to the dead body created the new possibility of "absolute" perception, allowing for more precise medical interventions, but at the same time coming into conflict with the open structures of "ordinary," non-scientific perception patterns in everyday life. On the basis of these distinctions, an analysis of the different perceptual patterns in medicine becomes possible. Such an analysis would be the task of a sub-field in medical philosophy that could be called "medical aesthetics" having as its goal an "art of perception" understood as a technique of adequately applying different perceptual patterns in medical practice.

The role of gender in very old age: Profiles of functioning and everyday life patterns.

The role of gender in very old age: Profiles of functioning and everyday life patterns.

Patient anxiety before surgery

At present time we have to face a new quality of fear and anxiety rooted in a social change of fundamental values. Disease and death are being increasingly ruled out from the pattern of everyday life. Therefore, disease and death represent an extreme emotional stress for today's human beings, who find it difficult to assess their significance. Against this background we must view human fear and anxiety before surgery. Nowadays, people have lost the ability of dealing with themselves and their own problems. There is no place for disease in a world dominated by materialism. Accordingly, it is an extreme challenge for any human remain psychologically stable, whereas, anxiety appears increasingly irrational. Both anaesthesiologists and surgeons are responsible for removing anxiety and affording assistance to patients expecting surgery. Consequently, contemporary strategies of therapy include both surgical and psychosocial aspects. Therefore, confidence concerning the relationship between surgeon and patient, consideration of psychosocial factors, and an interdisciplinary approach are essentially necessary to cure the patients from their disease. However, to alleviate and even remove the patients' preoperative anxiety, we must approach and meet the patient on an equal level: from human being to human being.

Introduction: Children and Families Enter History's Main Stream

In the past, the history of families and children sometimes found a place in specialized studies, local histories, and even elementary school books. On the other hand, they made but fleeting appearances in high school and university courses or in texts in national history. The prevailing situation was exemplified for this writer by the lectures and recommended textbook in the course in Canadian history taught by Gilbert N. Tucker at the University of British Columbia in the 1940s. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, families and children began to nudge their way into the consciousness of historians and then into the mainstream of Canadian history. Their appearance reflected the growing interest of historians in laying bare the characteristics and patterns of everyday life in the past. Some of what we learned about the history of both families and children can be seen by examining the contents of a letter written by a child during the Great War. Now, every national and regional text incorporates families and children, some more successfully than others, into its narrative.

‘They still use some of their past’: historical salience in elementary children's chronological thinking

Fifty‐eight students at seven grade levels (kindergarten through sixth) from three population groups (urban, suburban and rural) were presented with the task of chronologically ordering a set of nine historical pictures and ‘thinking aloud’ about the task. The results of this study provide increased evidence regarding the kind and sources of children's historical knowledge, and how they deploy that knowledge. The most accessible historical knowledge for early and middle grade children apparently relates to changes in material culture and the patterns of everyday life. It appears, too, that the intertexts that inform children's historical understanding, especially prior to fourth grade, provide better information about material culture than about other aspects of change over time. In addition, some children at all grade levels linked history to such sociocultural issues as race and gender. Finally, by fifth grade, children were learning a new reference system that consisted of specific eras (Colonial, Revo...

Sexuality Education of Young Children: Parental Concerns

Transmission of values and attitudes about sexuality from parents to children is inevitable; values and attitudes are transmitted whether parents choose to actively participate in the sexuality education of their children or are neglectful in the matter (Allen & Baber, 1992; Calderone, 1989; Goldman & Goldman, 1982; Klein & Gordon, 1992). The purpose of this article is to identify parental concerns about sexuality education that may contribute to parents' neglect of the topic of sexuality or make it difficult for them to take a proactive role in the sexuality education of their young children. Research on Sexuality Education by Parents Over the past two decades, researchers, recognizing the impact of the family on a child's developing sexuality and future behavior, have addressed the issue of sexuality education by parents. Most of this research has focused on school-aged children and their parents (e.g., Baldwin & Baronoski, 1990; Brown, 1989; Bundy & White, 1990; Huston, Martin, & Foulds, 1990; Kirby, 1985). Only a few recent studies have addressed the issue of parents as sexuality educators of young (preschool) children (Alter & Wilson, 1982; Davis, Koblinsky, & Sugawara, 1986; Hodson & Wampler, 1988; Koblinsky & Atkinson, 1982; Roberts, Kline, & Gagnon, 1978). Roberts et al. (1978) surveyed parents of 3-to 11-year-olds and concluded that most parents feel one conversation about sexuality during a child's development is sufficient. Koblinsky and Atkinson (1982) examined parents' plans for sexuality education of their children and found that both mothers and fathers plan to participate; however, most plan to delay discussion of value laden topics until early adolescence. A two-hour program for mothers was shown to improve their teaching skills, but did not increase their comfort with the topic of sexuality or their frequency of communication with their preschool children (Davis et al., 1986). Hodson and Wampler (1988) found that both middle class and working class parents indicated a high degree of comfort in discussing sexuality topics with their young children. However, working class parents in their study preferred to have the mother actually provide information to the child, whereas middle class parents preferred that both parents be involved with giving information to children. Several years ago, Mathtech, Inc. received a Centers for Disease Control contract to develop, implement, and evaluate a model program to help parents educate their preschool to adolescent age children about sexuality. These researchers identified five areas where parents needed help: addressing their own conflicting feelings about sexuality, exploring their own attitudes and values, obtaining accurate information, developing their communication skills, and understanding their roles as sexuality educators (Alter & Wilson, 1982). Each of the studies reviewed here started with hypotheses derived from prior theory and research without consideration of respondents' own thoughts and theories about sexuality education. With the exception of the Alter and Wilson (1982) study, none has suggested that parents must address their own conflicting feelings about sexuality. Additionally, an essential piece missing from current research is information that describes in parents' own words their everyday concerns about sexuality education. Parental Influence on Children's Sexual Health The importance of the family's influence on the sexual health of children is emphasized by sexuality educators (Calderone, 1989; Klein & Gordon, 1992), and it is well accepted that positive sex-related interaction patterns in everyday life are important to healthy family sexuality (Maddock, 1989). Empirical evidence indicates that adolescents whose parents communicated openly with them about sexuality when they were young report feeling much more comfortable discussing sexual topics with their parents and are more likely to make personal decisions about sexual behavior that reflect parental values and morals (Brock & Jennings, 1993; Fisher, 1988). …