Blog
Lifestyle Diversity
My blog posts at the Institute for family studies are here
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Subcultures, subgroups, and why they matter.
What is lifestyle diversity? One way to put it is “the actual practices of groups, whether subcultures, social classes, ethnic groups or other who adopt a specific way of life, in contrast with other groups.” It could be simple livers, or criminal gangs, or religious communities, or leisure subcultures, or survivalists. I’ve been studying and writing on this for years (including a forthcoming book), and will blog about new research and related thoughts here. The topic is crucial if one wants to understand social problems and inequalities, among other things. It’s also intended simply to help us understand those who may be unlike us. There’s always plenty of new material on this topic!
Food Lifestyle Patterns
Great new article by two academics at U Florida:
Food lifestyle patterns among contemporary food shoppers by Lijun Angelia Chen and Lisa House
International Journal of Consumer Studies 2021
They found five distinct food lifestyle segments: passionately involved consumers (11%), nutrition-focused
consumers (30%), moderately involved consumers (17%), convenience-oriented consumers (21%), and uninvolved consumers (21%). These groups match up with statistics on ill health across regions. How we eat matters!
Health Lifestyles
There’s very interesting work done in this area. One categorization is from a group of researchers writing in the Journal of American Dietetic Association:
- Physical Fantastics
- Active Attractives
- Tense but Trying
- Decent Dolittles
- Passively Healthy
- Hard-living Hedonists
- Noninterested Nihilists
We go off in different directions, and this has a major influence on outcomes, as in how our chronic conditions make us vulnerable or not to more serious conditions like Covid 19, heart disease and stroke, among other things.
Lifestyle Diversity among women
Interesting new work by Bo-Hyeong Jane Lee on women’s orientations: She finds four different groups:
- Career-Family Idealists (CFI)
- Family Agnostics (FA)
- Independent Maternalists (IM)
- Family Conventionalists.
Lots of diversity here about whether to orient to work, family, or education, and we need to understand this to really comprehend debates over gender.
Michael Jindra 