Factors influencing the choice of the people to lead a healthy lifestyle - Курсовая работа

Introduction Healthy lifestyle has always been important for people all over the world. There exist many definitions of this concept, however, one of the definitions was given in a Journal of Health and Social Behavior: «Health lifestyles are defined here as collective patterns of health-related behavior based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances (Cockerham 2000a)». [8] It is well known for everybody what should be done in order to remain healthy for a long time and what should be definitely avoided. Still, a large number of people suffer from early alcoholism, smoking, overweight, hypodynamia, hypertonia along with osteochondrosis, and etc. Everyone understands that keeping up with the healthy lifestyle is crucial. Moreover, this topic has been actively discussed in mass media over the last 30 years. According to Roshina (2014) research paper, health is one of the major components of humans’ well-being as well as a factor affecting human’s income and other opportunities. There exist a number of vital issues that affect human’s health improvement or deterioration. For instance, in contemporary world people do not pay much attention to the diet they stick to. Popularity of fast food restaurants negatively affects health status and lead to overweight in all categories of people from small children to adults. What is more, this problem is observed not only in developed countries but also in developing ones. Another issue is neglecting regular visits to doctors and avoiding the checks of the health status. As a result, a lot of sicknesses and problems are discovered at terminal stages. Smoking, as well as uncontrolled alcohol consumption, are habits that have horrifying effect on humans’ health. Some people start smoking when they are young, due to the influence of the fashion and social environment. Unfortunately, only few of them are able to give it up when they understand what kind of addiction smoking is. Similarly, alcoholism frequently starts as a way to have fun with friends or get away from day-to-day problems. And these are just a small number of issues that have adverse effect on the health. It should be mentioned that health status affects not only particular humans but the economy of countries in general. Poor health conditions of population results in two types of costs: direct and indirect (Kolosnytcina, Berdnikova, 2009) [2]. Direct costs are represented by populations’ expenditures on medical services, such as visiting doctors, drugs, medical procedures, etc. Indirect costs of poor health condition of the population primarily affect labor market. It is known that people are the source of labor for every country and apparently healthy citizens work harder, skip less working days due to illnesses and provide more added value that is one of the main attributes of county’s prosperity. Thus, the healthier the population is, the higher is gross domestic product. Therefore, the health status of a population is a macro indicator that shows how developed a particular country is and how favorable are the conditions for living and working in it. It is essential to understand the current situation and find out whether there is an opportunity to improve the conditions for citizens in the future. That is why, modelling of factors that lead to healthy lifestyle of a population remains an important issue for research. Taking into account the importance of population’s health for country’s economy, it is crucial to understand, which factors affect health condition. This knowledge might be useful for construction of educational programs and programs promoting healthy lifestyle targeted at particular groups of people. Fitting educational programs to a particular classes of people will allow them to be more effective and reach higher results. In this paper, we are going to investigate what factors influence the choice of people to stick to a particular type of lifestyle. The sample considered within our research consists of people aged 14 to 40 in Russia in a period from 2005-2014. We eliminated people that are older than 40 years old from our research in order to avoid age issues. We believe that after 40 people are likely to have health problems that do not depend only on their lifestyle, but also could happen due to the age. Our assumption is backed by the research of Ekaterina Scherbakova that was published in Demoscop Weekly, where it was discovered that people start having health problems that arise due to age at the level of 40-50 years old. So, we decided to take the lower border in our research to make sure that our results are not affected by health issues that depend on the age. [27] The aim of our research is to discover factors that determine what type of lifestyle a particular person leads. On the first stage of the research the sample will be divided into clusters, according to a person’s lifestyle type. For example, first cluster will include people who do not