Health lifestyles and gender: Implications for sociological theory and public health.

摘要

Health behaviors are clear predictors of morbidity and mortality in the U.S. and appear to combine to form health lifestyles that vary on a continuum from health enhancing to those that are associated with poor health. Theoretical work on health lifestyles indicates the importance of studying health behaviors as facets of the more general concept of lifestyle and recent empirical work finds that health behaviors combine to form distinctive health lifestyles for people with different levels of educational status. However, there are no studies of how gender structures health lifestyle with multiple health behaviors incorporated into one measure. Thus, in this dissertation I create a health lifestyle index comprised of five health behaviors, enacted for health reasons that have been found consistently to affect morbidity and mortality: cigarette smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, fruit/vegetable consumption, fat consumption. I use multiple regression analysis to assess the relationship between gender on the health lifestyle construct and to identify whether gender and educational status as well as gender and five intervening variables interact in their association with health lifestyles. The research questions are: (1) Do women and men differ in the individual health behaviors that comprise a health lifestyle net of other social statuses? (2) Does gender predict health lifestyles? (3) Does the relationship between gender and health lifestyle vary by education? (4) How do selected personal orientations vary by gender? (5) Do these personal orientations toward health predict health lifestyle? (6) Do these personal orientations account for gender differences in health lifestyles? Main findings are that gender is associated with health lifestyle but is not independent of personal orientations toward health. Two personal variables, health knowledge seeking and perceiving the need to actively prevent health problems, have a direct association with health lifestyle and explain the relationship between gender and health.