Jerome E Singer Uniformed Services School of Medicine

The need to measure life styre

It has often been said that the fish will be the last to discover water. And just as they have been swimming in an environment so com- prehensive that they do not notice it, in like fashion psychological ecologists have been living in and talking about an environment which goes similarly unnoticed. While we have, in various ways, been studying particular features of the environment: crowding, air quality conditions, noise and other variables, one rather pervasive notion cuts across all these measures. This is the concept of style of life. Style of life has been a focal or critical concept in a number of domains, yet few, if any, serious attempts have been made to measure it in a fashion by which its status or change could be described. I

It is unclear why there is so little rigorous discussion of style of life in the professional literature; any number of speculative reasons could be possible. One salient point is the similarity of the term to that of quality of life, a conception that has received exten- sive review and consideration. This paper will be organized into three main parts. First, the need for measures of life style will be demonstrated by a brief examination of several current research areas in which style of life is interwoven, either explicitly or im- plicitly. Second, style of life will be differentiated from related and complementary, but dissimilar notions, such as quality of life or life experience surveys. Third, some first steps toward an outline for the construction of life style measurement instruments will be presented.

Inlernalional Review of Applied Psychology (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol. 31 (1982). 303-315

304 Jerome E Singer

Research areas with life style components

As a beginning, rather than attempting a rigorous definition of a somewhat amorphous concept, let us look at a number of areas in which style of life figures, at least conceptually, as a dependent measure.

Health

In recent years more and more psychologists have turned to the study of health, illness, and other psychological aspects of biomedical studies. The newly titled field of behavioural medicine is in part a testimony to psychological and behavioural science interest in these fields. One of the major points of interest and attack has been that in recent years the conception of health has become more than just the opposition to disease or the combating of specific pathogens. Indeed, in the last few years certain infectious diseases, for centuries the scourge of mankind, have virtually disappeared. Smallpox is now reduced to a small number of cases per year worldwide (WHO, 1977). Antibiotics and other drugs have greatly reduced many other infectious diseases and have the capacity to prevent the onset and spread of epidemics. In general, im- provements in public health have substantially reduced the death rates in a variety of areas, leaving medicine and related disease- interested disciplines to deal with issues of prevention, manage- ment, and rehabilitation.

The resulting field of study - health behaviour - suggests several psychological inputs into health and medical care: two areas come immediately to mind. The first is those aspects of human behaviour which relate to the occurrence or incidence of disease. More and more, coronary heart disease, and to a large extent cancer, are being conceived of as pathological conditions which occur in response to a variety of ways in which individuals live. Diet, exercise, smoking - these are but a few of the various aspects of personal behaviours which are now intimately linked with health and physical well be- ing. In a sense this is nothing new. Drug problems, addictions, and alcoholism have long been conceived of as questions not of par- ticular pathogens but styles of life (cf., for example, Kahn and Holroyd, 1973; LeMay and Penn, 1973; Penn, 1974). The other

The need 10 measure lifestyle 305

major areas within the health field in which style of life plays a part are those of chronic diseases. As medical science has advanced technically, life expectancy has increased, potential causes of death have been reduced, and more people are now confronted with a life spent in managing a chronic or semipermanent condition. Increases in diabetes, rheumatism, arthritis (USHEW, 1977), and the like all signal that the management of life must be involved with the management of way of life or life style.

Energy

Although the conditions leading to the rapid increase in the cost of the various forms of energy and the immediate acute crisis in fuel oil supply which was triggered off in the winter of 1974 have become particularly newsworthy events, the long-run questions of energy use, consumption, format, and choice of energy supply are ones which are closely involved with style or way of life. While a general population is being asked to change energy use and supply, ostensibly in order to lower their energy costs or preserve a dwindl- ing national or world supply, in reality it is their life style which they are being asked to change. Anecdotally this can be illustrated by a story in a local newspaperZ describing how an architect who specializes in non-conventional household heating and air condi- tioning goes about selecting clients for solar heating systems.

When prospective clients approach him the first question which he asks them is: do you have an electric can opener? Far from being flippant or irrelevant, the architect is acting as an amateur psychologist and, perhaps, a very good one. He is keying his deci- sions as to whether those approaching him are appropriate as clients by assessing their life style. And as a measure of life style he has a simple one question index: do you need electricity to open your cans of food? Not an infallible index certainly, but perhaps not a bad start. In fact many of the crises in which we currently find ourselves with respect to energy stem not from the overly rapid march of technology but from certain life styles or ways of life. Thus the United States with 6 percent of the world’s population uses 30 percent of its energy. In contrast to many other developed Western nations with similar economic indices such as gross national product or per capita income, its energy per capita is extra- ordinarily high. In a recent year, West Germany had per capita

306 Jerome E Singer

energy use of 5.3 megawatts; Sweden’s was 6.2 megawatts; the US, with an equivalent standard of living, used double the amount of per capita energy, 11 .O megawatts (UN, 1977). In large part, US life style is different from West Germany and Sweden and more energy intensive. If reduction of energy use without reduction in living standard is a goal, this becomes not a question of industrialization or standard of living, but rather one of style of life.

Architecture

To some extent 90 percent of the field of environmental psychology has been studies of space and physical conditions. The major ques- tions have been: what kinds of personal distances do people use and prefer in talking to others? What sorts of housing do they desire for their families or their offices? What sorts of space should aid in accomplishing what sorts of tasks? Urban critics from Jane Jacobs (1957) to Lewis Mumford (1973) also talk about arrangements of buildings in neighbourhoods in such a way as to foster particular ends. These arrangements, whether personal, familial, residential, office and business, or in larger units such as neighbourhoods and cities, all reflect opinions, values, and, in a sense, votes for one or another style of life. Indeed, their proponents often implicitly use style of life, way of living, or change in the manner in which people conduct their day to day enterprises, as the measure of whether or not particular design criteria have produced the effects that were in- tended. Further, some researchers have evaluated this strategy, stud- ying whether specific designs facilitate or inhibit the inhabitants’ preferred activities. The rationale for the suggested architectural designs, the effects the designs are intended to produce, and the im- plicit criteria for evaluating design innovations all hinge upon life style. One has only to read the theories advanced by prominent architects to see they are concerned not only with establishing the aesthetics of physical space but also, and even more prominently, to prescribe and modify style of life (e.g., Wright, 1953; 1958).

Social ethics

In the past decade there have been significant changes in what is acceptable as an ethical or personal statement about conditions of liv-

The need lo measure lifeslyle 307

ing. In such areas as sexual preferences, the emergence of homosex- ual or gay activist groups testifies that this is now a more socially acceptable mode of living. The changing status of marriage, illustrated by the increasing number of single parent households, and the rise in special facilities for the warehousing of the elderly in old age homes, all testify that the traditional Western pattern of nuclear familial residence with some extended lineal family obligation is breaking down. Without addressing the question of the moral value of these changes, a case is being argued that the mere statistics of the incidence of some of these phenomena, such as the social in- dicators reporting rates of single adult heads of household, the ratio of divorces to marriages (USHEW, 1977), and the like do not really document the impact of these changes on the lives of the in- dividuals involved. That could only be done if we had some way of measuring the extent to which the way people’s lives are organized and lived has been altered.

Distinctive minorities

In many of the more developed countries and certainly in some of the lesser developed ones there exist substantial ethnic minorities or distinct subgroups which have their own particular character, ethos, and culture. Quite often these are remnants of indigenous populations which have been supplanted in the last millenium by populations with a generalized Western developed culture. Native Indian groups in the United States, tinkers in the British Isles, gyp- sies in the Balkans, and Lapps in Scandinavia are but a few of the groups which immediately come to mind that fit in this category. Even assuming the best of intentions and the most humane of con- siderations, all governments with such groups falling under their jurisdiction are faced with a fundamental problem: how to impose some aspects of the developing society upon these groups without destroying their indigenous culture. Can one bring employment, public health, and similar potential benefits to these groups without at the same time westernizing them? In what ways, if at all, should these groups be insulated from modern transportation and com- munication facilities? The questions are not just ones for the governments but are ones which deeply concern the ethnic groups themselves. Yet in any trade off between technical innovations from the larger society and changes in the culture of the subgroup,

308 Jerome E Singer

what is implicit is a way of measuring style or way of life: this measure to be used as a benchmark in evaluating the effects of social change.

The five areas discussed are not the only ones in which the ques- tion of style or way of life becomes germane, but they do illustrate the wide need Tor and the potential applicability of style of life measurement. What is most surprising is how few attempts have been made to tackle the problem directly.

Complementary but dissimilar research areas

Qualify of life

There are some related questions, although seemingly discussing similar points, that are not really focussed on the same issue. Although there is great similarity in the phrases quality of life and sfyle of life they are far from the same thing. Quality of life refers to the extent to which people are satisfied with their current situa- tion. At present the recent work of Campbell, Converse and Rodgers (1976) stands as perhaps the best attack on the question of how this should be measured. They developed, through survey techniques, a detailed attempt to answer three quality of life ques- tions: general satisfaction, general health, and satisfaction in several particular domains. It is clear, however, that their inventory could very well find two people with similar qualities of life, i.e., similar satisfaction with their current status, or indeed find the same person with similar satisfactions at different times in his or her life even though the life styles involved were completely dif- ferent. A person living a solitary life as a small farmer raising much of what is needed for a direct survival could express a certain degree of satisfaction with that condition. The same degree of satisfaction could be expressed by an urban dweller leading a har- ried, unsolitary life and purchasing all those requirements needed for his daily existence. The conclusion is that the quality of life ex- ists independently of style of life. Ultimately both measures will be needed but it is worth noting that whereas there have been several attempts (e.g., Bradburn and Nell, 1969; Campbell, Converse and Rodgers, 1976; Terleckyj, 1975) with various degrees of success to attack the general question of the measurement of quality of life,

The need 10 measure life sryle 309

there have been very few attempts to construct some kind of scale or inventory for measure of a way or style of life.

Life change

There is another line of research that measures some of the facets of life style. This is exemplified by the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, known familiarly as the Life Change Inventory (Holmes and Rahe, 1967). Originally designed as a way to measure precursors to the effects of stress and act as a predictor for potentially debilitating psychosomatic events, the Holmes and Rahe scale is a listing of various life changes. It includes such events as divorce, marriage, birth of a child, change of a job, change of residence, death of a family member, and so forth. These events have been psycho-physically scaled by a variety of judges in a number of con- texts so that each event has a scaled value corresponding to the magnitude of the change the event produces. By checking off which events have occurred ir. the past year or eighteen months a respon- dent to this scale can indicate how stressful or what amount of change has occurred over that time. Does this number or one similarly obtained then give us a measure of life style or way of life? Probably not, and for two reasons: first, it is not comprehensive enough to measure the changes that are needed to assess the five domains previously mentioned, and second, a change measured by the scale may be stressful without altering life style. Two quick ex- amples may suffice. Consider the birth of a child. It is clear that it is stressful to add an infant to a family. The Holmes and Rahe scale suggests that the magnitude of the adjustment, the amount of life change necessary, does not differ whether one is talking about a first birth or a third birth or a fifth birth. Yet clearly one might argue that for the childless couple, the occurrence of a first birth represents a different change of life style than does a third birth for a couple with two children. That the stress involved in coping with the infant may be the same in either case does not alter the fact that the way or style of life on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day, or year- by-year basis may change markedly for a first birth but not alter as a result of the incremental birth of a later child. More cogently, consider divorce. Clearly a divorce represents a stressful event. I t may also indicate a change of life style; but in some circumstances it may not. On the Holmes and Rahe basis a person who has been

310 Jerome E Singer

married to a spouse, divorced, and then almost immediately remar- ried to a similar spouse, has, according to the scale, undergone two stressful changes in life events, yet the style of life in any measurable fashion may not have been altered between the first marriage and the second one. On the other hand someone who has been married, obtained a divorce, and then remained single has undergone less stress (only one event on the Holmes and Rahe scale has been applicable) but may have undergone a more profound change in life style - from being married with one set of ar- rangements to being single with a totally different set. The point is not to criticize a scale which was not designed to measure way or style of life, but rather to point out why the life change unit ap- proach is not a satisfactory answer to the general requirements for a style of life or way of life scale.

Recommendations for assessment of sryle of life

Now it is obviously easier to state what needs to be done, or to show how present instruments do not satisfy that need, than it is to design or implement new measures or to remedy existing gaps. Yet it is possible to make a first attempt at specifying what could be in- cluded in a style of life measure. The approach is akin to that used by structural-functionalists in anthropology (e.g., Aberle et al., 1950) in that prerequisite conditions can be discussed as a minimum set of requirements for a proposed index or measure.

1 . Activity budgets

An important part of a person’s style of life may be described by the ways in which resources are allocated. If we knew for one day how a person divided her or his time among all the daily activities, a time/activity budget - where and in what type of spaces a person went and stayed during a day, a spacelactivity budget - and with whom a person spoke, met, and corresponded during a day, an interaction/activity budget - we would have taken an important first step in classifying that person’s life style.

The difficulty, of course, is one of balance. That is, of creating budgets detailed and comprehensive enough to detect subtle, but

The need 10 measure life sryle 31 1

important, differences, yet not so large and encyclopedic as to generate vast amounts of unanalyzable data and render each per- son’s day as a clinical study. The first pitfall - oversimplicity - can be seen in the various personality classification schemes which arise from time to time. These often create a dichotomy, type Xs and type Ys, and lead investigators to measure them. Whatever merits the typologies have for predicting specific behaviours or out- comes, they do not describe life style adequately. To know that a person is athletic, or coronary prone, or affiliative does not, either singly or in combination, tell us enough to be a sufficient descrip- tion of the style of life.

Alternatively, too much information can be overwhelming. The literary examples of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1940), who took a longer time to write of his early days than to live them, or of Gon- charov’s description of Oblomov (1915), where over 50 pages of text are required to record his getting dressed in the morning, can serve as examples. More to the point, Barker’s behavioural ecology (e.g., Barker, 1966), and the descriptions of sequences of actions of children, show how measures can be too detailed to be useful for style of life assessment. Perhaps the separation of time, space, and interaction activities can help locate a convenient middle ground.

2. Habit inventories

A second useful datum for assessing a style of life is a survey of a person’s habits, from hygiene, food selections and preferences, to sexual activities. Once again the key t o the utility of such an inven- tory lies in its ability to capture important and distinctive facets of the person’s life without overwhelming detail. The nature of the items to be included will be shaped by the purposes for which style of life is being assessed. If the five illustrations discussed earlier are again considered - health behaviour, energy use, architectural design, social ethics, and distinctive minorities - they can provide a framework for selecting relevant habits to survey. Thus, for ex- ample, for health, we would want to know whether and how much a person smokes, for architecture, whether a person prefers reading or talking to others as a leisure activity, for social ethics, sexual preferences and activities are important, for distinctive minorities, religious practices, and so forth. The collection of this information will always be tempered by the circumstances of the inquiry, the

312 Jerome E Singer

ethicality of the research study, and the willingness of the research subjects to report personal charactersitics and have them used as data. All things considered, however, the habit inventory can be a vivid descriptor of way of life.

3. Technology inventory

A third part of a style of life assessment would consist of an elaboration of the technology used on a daily basis for various tasks. What does a person use for transportation - feet, a horse, or an automobile? How are clothes obtained and maintained? The use of technology indicators, particularly, though not exclusively, in cross-cultural studies, can provide important style of life descrip- tot's. One problem in constructing the inventory is that the same person may use different technology for different tasks or at dif- ferent times, for example, sometimes driving a car, sometimes walking. It may be difficult to develop an inventory of reasonable length, zble to ascertain the critical differences without also asking a host of questions irrelevant to most cases. One solution, sug- gested in the illustrations mentioned earlier, is to consider those ac- tivities basic to all people - food, clothing, shelter, and work - and to concentrate on surveying the technology usually employed in cxecuting these activities on a daily basis. It tells us a lot about a person's life style to know that her or his food is prepackaged or frozen, her or his clothes are washed and dried in an automatic ap- pliance, her or his house is air-conditioned, and that her or his daily labour requires merely a pencil or at least a truck.

Have any of these procedures been tried? The answer is yes and no. Time and activity budgets have figured in research directed toward other goals and for other purposes. Yet, because of the various indexing systems used by abstracting compendia and data bases, it is at least a Herculean, and probably an impossible, task to retrieve references to these works. Investigators do not usually classify or categorize their research by descriptions of the particular methods. To be sure, they may report whether their study was a survey or an experiment, but the nature of the questionnaire or ex- perimental task is most often not recoverable from the abstract, let alone the key word indexing system.

The suggestions for measurement are not meant to be definitive. Rather they are speculations about feasible approaches to the

The need 10 measure life srvle 313

measurement of a pervasive aspect of environmental psychology, that of style of life. This concept, though implicitly involved as an important construct in a variety of domains, remains unexplored as a systematic focus of study. Research does not flow smoothly from the conception of a problem to its solution. Even a cursory look at the history of science tells us that an incomplete or badly-formed attack on a problem is often constructive; the corrective measures it provokes may not otherwise have been advanced. Environmental psychology is probably at a stage where some reasoned attempt to measure style of life is needed, despite the almost certainty that early attempts will be neither complete nor sufficient. Style of life has emerged a$ too useful a construct not to be t,he subject and object of concerted efforts to develop research measures for it.

This is a revised version of a paper presented at a symposium, Environrnenrol Ewhrarion, XIX International Congress of Applied Psychology, Munich, August 1978.

I . I t is difficult to ascertain from standard index sources, such as Psychological Absiracis, just what previous studies have been made of the concept of style of life. There may be relevant articles which do address the concept but d o not use the terms \tyle of life or life style. However, the few entries which d o use those terms are either very cpecialized, otherwise unpublished doctoral dissertations. or both.

2. Many of the illustrations and examples are from the perspective of the United States only because that is the one with which the author is most familiar. The issues involved certainly generalize to most of industrial Western society and probably 10 oilier trnnsnntional applications.

i 14 Jerome E Singer

References

4bcrle. D. F., Cohen, A. K., Levy, Jr., M. J . and Sutton, F. X. (1950) ‘The Func- tional Prerequisites of a Society’, Erhics, LX, 100-1 1 1 .

Barker, Roger (I 966) One Boyk Day - A Specimen Record of Behavior. Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press.

Bradburn, N. M. and Nell, C. E. (1969) The Strucrure of Psychological Well-being. Chicago: A:ditir Publishing Co.

Campbell, A., Cmverse, P. E. and Rodgers, W. L. (1976) The Qualiry of American Liyc: Perceprioi:s, Evaluations, and Sarisfacrions. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Goncharov, Ivan A. (1915) Oblomov. New York: Macmillan. Holme\, T . H. a1i~1 Rahe, R. H. (1967) ‘The Social Readjustment Rating Scale’,

.!ncob\, Jane (1957) The Dear11 and Lge of Grear Aiiierican Ciries. New York: Free

K;;Ihn, M . and Ho!royd, K . (1973) ‘Comparability o f Drug Abuse Rating Scales’,

LcMa!, Morris L. and Penn, J . Roger (1973) ‘Drug Usage Trends in College Living

Iluml’ord, Lewis ( 1973) Ciry Developmenr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Pcnn, J . Roger (1974) ‘College Student Lifestyle and Frequency of Alcohol Usage’,

1976 Srtiri.riica1 Yearbook (1977) New York: Department of Economic and Social

Siernc, Laurence, J. (1940) Trislrarn Shandy: The Lve and Opinions of Trixrram

U‘riglii, Franh L. (1953) The Furure of Archirecrure. New York: Horizon Press. M’ri_elit, Frank L. (1958) The Living Ciry. New York: Horizon Press. ‘Vnccinating Against Smallpox’ (1977) WHO Chronicle, 31, 238. I ’ i t d r i d Hmlrli Srari.sric.y (1977) Rockville: US Department of Health, Education,

Jo~tr-iiul of Pryc~rosoii~aric Research, 1 I , 213-218.

Pre\\.

P.~.v~~holoyicul Reporrs, 33, 699-702.

Unii< during a Three-Year Period’, Drug Forum, 2, 309-315.

Joi(r i iul of Atiicj icon College Healrh Associarion, 22, 220-222.

.4ftairs, United Nations Publishing Service.

Shrr/idy, Ge/itle/nan. Indianapolis: Odyssey Press.

and Welfare. Public Health Service, National Center of Health Statistics.

Le besoin de mesurer le style de vie

11 est etonnant de voir que 1’Ctude du style de vie est un aspect neglige de la psychologie de I’environnement. Bien qu’une dkfini-