��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge study examining movement and activity levels in older adults seeking participants

trevor.kenney — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 21:53:08 +0000

While multiple research studies have shown how important it is to avoid long bouts of sitting and incorporate movement into your every day, older adults — like many others — often fail to achieve these goals. A new study from Dr. Paige Pope at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge aims to develop strategies to get older adults moving more.

Pope, a health promotion researcher in the Department of Kinesiology & Physical Education, is now recruiting participants for her Move More, Sit Less study. Designed for adults 65 years or older, the study looks to provide participants with a greater awareness of their sitting patterns and help them establish realistic strategies to decrease or break up their sitting time.

Research has shown older adults (aged 65 and older) spend more time sitting than other age groups.

“Sitting is something we all do. Many people spend the majority of their day sitting, without realizing the total amount of time they spend doing it,” says Pope.

Research has shown older adults (aged 65 and older) spend more time sitting than other age groups, averaging 9.4 to 9.9 hours sitting during their daily waking hours.

“This is concerning because greater sitting time is linked with numerous health concerns that are more prevalent among older adults. These include functional limitations, reduced mobility, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and all-cause mortality,” says Pope, citing a recent study by fellow ULethbridge kinesiologist Dr. Jennifer Copeland.

Move More, Sit Less will take place over a 13- or 21-week timeframe and help participants gain a stronger understanding of how to change their habits and incorporate more movement throughout their day. It also seeks to give researchers a deeper look into how older adults’ sitting time and sitting patterns are related to important aging factors such as fear of falling, quality of life and feelings of vitality.

Pope has already run one group through the study, which uses brief informative messages to reinforce movement goals and records participants’ activity through an activity tracking device. The feedback from the first group has been positive.

“As a senior, and having mobility issues, sometimes moving is hard to do. Because of this, when I look at the motivational messages in the envelopes, and the notes that I leave for myself, I can stimulate myself and others in the building where I live to move and have fun,” says one participant.

Another notes how tracking sitting and moving patterns makes you much more aware of how often you are inactive.

Pope is looking for participants who can stand independently or with an aid, read English fluently, and can commit to a 13- or 21-week timeframe. Eligible participants will receive informative messages with tips and strategies to get them up and moving more; wear an activity tracking device; and receive a detailed summary of their activity patterns at the end of the study. Participants are also eligible to receive $40 in $10 increments throughout the study.

For more information, contact the Psychology for Active Living and Sports Lab at PALS@uleth.ca, or by calling 403-332-4435.

This research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Research project examines happiness and well-being in intentional communities

caroline.zentner — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 20:25:40 +0000

As scholarly research and policy initiatives have more recently focused on happiness, Dr. Catherine Kingfisher, an anthropologist at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, couldn’t help but think about well-being at a community level.

“A lot of the literature in happiness studies, which is a fairly new area of scholarship, is focused overwhelmingly on the individual,” says Kingfisher. “From an anthropological perspective, too much emphasis on the individual is a problem because EuroAmerican forms of individualism are not culturally universal. So, I started asking myself what other approaches are out there that might allow us to broaden our perspective.”

After exploring several possibilities, Kingfisher settled on intentional communities, specifically urban collective housing communities, which are gaining in popularity yet remain understudied. Like other intentional communities, urban collective housing communities locate happiness and well-being, at least in part, in particular forms of social organization. But they are unique in two ways.

“The first is that they’re urban,” says Kingfisher. “Unlike other forms of intentional community, like ecovillages and spiritual communes, they are integrated with the wider society rather than segregated from it. At the same time, they are critical of mainstream society and try to create something that can respond to the kinds of loneliness, fragmentation and isolation they see as characteristic of society today.”

The second feature of these communities is that they are neither exclusively collectivist nor exclusively individualist. Residents have their own apartments, complete with a kitchen and bathroom, but the housing community also has common kitchen, eating and meeting areas, shared gardens, laundry rooms and play areas for children.

“What is unique about these places, and what has real policy implications, is that they’re hybrids,” says Kingfisher. “There’s a balance — a constant negotiation, really — between what is considered personal and private and what is considered public and collective. In these communities, happiness and well-being are constructed as simultaneously social and subjective, not one or the other.”

Kingfisher, who was awarded more than $111,000 over four years from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, has chosen two communities: Kankanmori in Tokyo and Quayside Village in Vancouver. The study will focus on how the relationship between interdependence and independence is negotiated, and on how the idea of balance is mobilized in everyday practice. It will also compare how the model of urban collective housing plays out in a society that has historically emphasized individualism, like Canada, and one that has historically emphasized collectivity, like Japan. This comparative analysis will provide insight into how ideas morph as they travel across cultural space and how they are translated and assembled in specific contexts of practice.

“They have the exact same model — they want to create a community where people can have their own space but also have community — but this plays out in very different ways, given the cultural context,” she says.

On her preliminary visits to the collective housing communities, Kingfisher found distinct differences in the way things are done. In Japan, a strict line divides personal from common space while the line is fluid in Vancouver. The two communities handle conflict in different ways, too. In Quayside Village, people are encouraged to express their feelings when conflicts arise while Japanese culture values controlling one’s emotions.

The project is designed to be collaborative in nature. One unique methodological feature involves bringing two members of each community to visit the other.

“This will allow community members to learn about other approaches and reflect on their own ideas and approaches,” says Kingfisher.

An additional aspect of Kingfisher’s study will have residents documenting life in their community through video recordings. Kingfisher will supply the equipment and Don Gill, a U of L Fine Arts professor and project collaborator, will act as an artistic consultant and visit both sites to facilitate the production of film shorts. Each community will also choose two residents to participate in a 10-day exchange to the other community in the study. They’ll be looking at how each community handles conflict and how they negotiate the boundary between the personal and the social. The eventual outcome will be a non-academic book in Japanese and English, along with film shorts.

“It’s fascinating and one of the reasons I want to bring people from each site to the other is so they get a sense of how things are done,” she says. “It gets them to reflect on how they are operating themselves and they get new ideas or they get their own ways of doing reinforced or validated.”

UNews - Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council SSHRC

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge study examining movement and activity levels in older adults seeking participants

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Research project examines happiness and well-being in intentional communities

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��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge study examining movement and activity levels in older adults seeking participants