1,720,956 research outputs found
Anxiety, eating, and the foodwork practices of individuals living alone
Full text linkSubmission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-12-04 without embargo termsThe student, Iulia Ciubotariu, accepted the attached license on 2023-07-20 at 12:43.The student, Iulia Ciubotariu, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2023-07-21 at 12:11.This Thesis was approved for publication on 2023-07-21 at 14:53.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19752 on 2023-12-04 at 17:03:36Living alone (LA) is becoming increasingly common, with 28% of households in the U.S. being single-person households. Although LA is common and on the rise, research often neglects this group of individuals, especially in relation to nutrition and mental health. Previous research shows that individuals LA may be at increased risk of poor mental health and nutrient intake. Still, the interplay between nutrition and mental health in the context of LA is understudied. This study aims to identify how anxiety manifests around food within the context of LA and how individuals cope with those anxieties. The first paper in this thesis is a literature review that was conducted to understand food-related behaviors and attitudes seen in single-person households and how they are associated with health and nutrition outcomes. The electronic search was conducted on PsycInfo, SocIndex, Scopus, and PubMed and yielded 36 papers. Included literature outcomes were grouped into four categories: eating patterns and types of foods consumed, nutrients and food groups, cooking practices and related behaviors, and bodies and health status. The review indicated that solo-living individuals might be more likely to have poor nutritional intake than those living with others. Specific eating patterns, eating practices, and foodwork practices were household-type dependent, such as eating alone, eating out, and skipping meals. Other practices were independent of living situation, such as meal times. The review indicated that those LA were more likely to be malnourished and have a higher disease risk. Women LA were more likely to eat alongside dietary recommendations, while men LA were more at risk of poor nutrition. Elderly individuals valued food taste and perceived healthiness, preferred home-cooked over convenience meals, and ate out less. They were also vulnerable to poor nutritional status and nutritional deficiencies. Additionally, the literature review identified that widows LA might have other eating and foodwork practices than non-widowed individuals LA. Women widows reported snacking more often, having fewer regular meal times, eating more convenience foods, and cooking less. Additional research is needed to understand further the relationship between LA and nutrition among different demographics. In conclusion, research suggests that eating and foodwork practices, nutrient intake, and health status may be related to the living situation, gender, and age. The second paper draws from data from the larger Cooking for One (C4O) qualitative study conducted between May and November 2021. The C4O project took a qualitative approach to study the relationship between eating, foodwork, and LA. The study was conducted in three Illinois counties: Champaign (metropolitan), Knox (rural), and McDonough (rural). Participants were recruited through various methods: flyers advertising the study posted in grocery stores, targeted emails to community hub members through Extension networks, and online eWeek announcements. The eligibility criteria were individuals over 18, LA full-time in Champaign, Knox, or McDonough County. Participants first completed a demographic survey, participated in the first semi-structured interview, completed a food diary and photovoice, and participated in the second semi-structured interview. After each interview, participants received a $30 gift card to a grocery store. Participants were instructed to record their food intake for seven consecutive days in the food diaries. For the photovoice, participants were asked to take photos that communicated the role of food or foodwork in their lives. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded. The data was organized through an initial open coding process, where broad themes were identified and categorized. There was a total of 59 participants, 57.6% of which were female, 33.9% male, and 8.5% identified as gender non-conforming (e.g., trans, non-binary, gender fluid). The present study focused on the participants’ anxiety and stress manifestation in the context of LA, eating, and foodwork practices. The following five major themes emerged: health and body-related anxieties, anxieties around lack of food knowledge or cooking confidence, anxiety around the social performance of cooking or eating, anxiety symptoms manifesting in food, and coping mechanisms to lessen anxiety and stress. This study showed the nuances of anxiety around food within the context of LA. Various pressures increased participants’ anxiety and stress concerning body shape, health, and cooking self-efficacy. Foodwork sometimes aggravated their already existing anxieties and stress. As a coping strategy, participants opted for convenience food items. Other participants’ anxiety around foodwork and eating was alleviated due to decreased expectations that come with living and cooking alone. For many participants, eating comfort food served as a coping mechanism for outside anxiety and stress. Foods that were most often mentioned as comfort foods were generally energy dense. Further research is needed to understand more about the relationship between LA, food, and anxiety, especially about what is unique to LA compared to other living situations. This research has several implications, such as informing clinicians and future interventions in populations that LA and deal with anxiety. This can include interventions to increase cooking self-efficacy and body image, which may lower related anxieties. Additionally, this research can inform clinicians, such as dietitians and physicians, to better understand the patient population who LA and further personalize their treatments
Food-related behaviors and attitudes around racial and ethnic foods in US adults who live alone
No full textSubmission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2027-05-01The student, Xiangning Tang, accepted the attached license on 2025-04-25 at 16:24.The student, Xiangning Tang, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2025-04-25 at 16:40.This Thesis was approved for publication on 2025-05-05 at 17:12.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #21991 on 2025-10-19 at 19:54:07The food-related behaviors and attitudes around racial and ethnic foods among US adults who live alone is an important topic of study. One-person households are the fastest-growing household form in the country (McCue, 2018; Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Unfortunately, certain populations living alone disproportionately have eating behaviors that are known to contribute to diet-related diseases (Sidenvall et al., 2000; Torres et al., 1992) and face mental health and social risks (Hu et al., 2012; Joutsenniemi et al., 2006; Ng & Northcott, 2015). Racial and ethnic minorities, in particular, face unique nutrition (James, 2004) and mental health challenges (Meyer et al., 2008). It is therefore important to study the intersection of living alone and food- related behaviors and attitudes among racial and ethnic minorities and how that can influence mental health and nutritional outcomes. This thesis uses Food Agency Theory to understand these phenomena. I use data from a larger project called Cooking for One, which is a multi- method project using quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods to investigate the household food practices of people living alone. Data from semi-structured qualitative interviews and photo voice exercises from 90 participants in Illinois were analyzed. Two themes emerged from these data. The first theme reveals the positive influence of foods related to participant’s racial and ethnic identity on their mental health and social connections by bringing them a sense of pride or comfort. The second themes the barriers to consuming foods related to people’s racial/ethnic identity. The positive influence of participant’s racial and ethnic foodways hold the potential to improve people’s mental health and social connectedness, while offering mixed impacts on nutritional outcomes (Lahne et al., 2017; van Strien et al., 2019). The second theme reveals the barriers to consuming foods related to participants’ racial or ethnic identity, which included limited access to ingredients needed to cook the food, negative beliefs surrounding the nutritional value of the food, and the complexity of food preparation for one person. Many participants were able to overcome these barriers by demonstrating food agency, but many participants struggled to enact food agency. Participants who were able to enact food agency were able to do so through their cooking skills to modify their food, had more flexible food attitudes, or had social connections that assisted them with overcoming the barriers. These findings highlight the unique food-related behaviors and attitudes around racial and ethnic foods among those who live alone, and how food agency can help alleviate barriers to consuming foods related to racial and ethnic identity faced by those living alone. These findings are important because they inform future research directions and potential nutrition interventions to help minimize some of the mental health or nutritional risks faced by racial and ethnic minorities living alone
Domestic Foodwork in Value and Practice: A Study of Food, Inequality and Health in Family Life
Full text linkThis dissertation explores home-cooked family meals – the ideals and expectations around them, as well as how they are navigated by parents in diverse social positions. This exploration assesses how discourses and practices surrounding family foodwork reflect and shape inequalities in a variety of realms including gendered labour, economic disparities, health outcomes and consumer politics. It utilizes diverse methods including a discourse and content analysis of North American news media, as well as qualitative interviews, cooking observations and food recall conversations with parents in the Greater Toronto Area who are primary cooks in their families. These varied methods facilitate investigation into how home cooking is publicly presented, automatically understood, and emotionally experienced by parents from diverse backgrounds. The dissertation explores these ends in three analytically distinct chapters, offering three key insights. First, the media analysis reveals that public discourse promotes a complex allocation of responsibility for family meals that recognizes multiple structural conditions constraining meals (such as unhealthy food environments and inflated normative standards), yet assigns responsibility for resolving them to individuals (i.e. parents should work harder to combat these constraints and cook more at home). These findings apply to family meals but can also be extended to consider responsibility for social problems within neoliberalism more broadly. Second, interview analysis identifies the ubiquity of a cultural schema of “cooking by our mother’s side”: an automatic, semi-conscious understanding of learning to cook that privileges culinary knowledge acquired during childhood through the social reproductive work of mothers. Analysis of this schema reveals its role in reproducing gendered inequalities and obscuring diversity in food learning, especially by overemphasizing the importance of childhood and masking learning later in life. Third, I qualitatively analyze how socio-economic disadvantage (alongside its intersections with gender and race/ethnicity) negatively impacts the emotional experience of foodwork but does not necessarily predict cooking pleasure. In identifying and exploring five conditions of cooking pleasure, I examine how certain conditions can operate relatively independently from class and facilitate cooking enjoyment for low-income groups. Collectively, the dissertation advances scholarly understanding of the ideals, meanings and emotions encompassing family foodwork, their embeddedness with social inequalities, as well as opportunities for resistance and social change.Ph.D.2020-12-22 00:00:0
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Relational routine and ritual use on social networking sites: Communicating commitment in the digital domain
Full text linkSubmission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2025-08-01The student, Christopher Maniotes, accepted the attached license on 2023-07-07 at 12:46.The student, Christopher Maniotes, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-07-07 at 15:51.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-07-10 at 15:58.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19556 on 2023-12-04 at 17:31:34Although research indicates that social media use can impact relationship dynamics and that routines and rituals guide relationship development, no research has examined the intersection of these bodies of work. The current study addressed this gap by examining the process around two distinct types of relational social networking site (SNS) use: instrumental (routine) and symbolic (ritual) use. By examining both types of SNS use with a grounded theory approach, the results highlight when new routines and rituals (online and offline) become important and how such importance contributes to relational health. The theoretical model developed at the intersection of couples’ varied SNS use suggests that SNSs are used as a vehicle for communicating relational commitment to partners, close others, and even strangers
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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