Tag Archives: sitting

Lots of material to study + limited time = a long time sitting

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A number of my research projects over the years have led to this scenario:

-I am in an archive or a library and there are lots of texts and artifacts I need to look at.

-The archive or library has their standard hours and I cannot spend endless time or days in the facility.

Photo by Adil Khan Marwat on Pexels.com

Because these materials are hard to find elsewhere (though the wonders of Interlibrary Loan has brought many things directly to me), I need to focus while there. This means I have a day – or multiple days – of focused sitting in front of me. There is not time for walking around, checking email, or eating. I need to get through the materials, figure out what might contribute to my project, and make sure I have that evidence to take with me. I need to be reading, processing, typing.

The last time I did this, I had a stack of books I needed to go through. I had one work day to do the work (which was a little shorter because of some driving time to get there). I sat for nearly five hours with one short bathroom break. I had headphones on listening to some good music and had a good window seat (but barely looked outside).

Was it fun? How did I feel afterward? It was work. My body felt tense afterward. But I had pages of notes. I was able to verify some needed information across sources and also see some different interpretations across the works. I took pictures of images in the books that I could use in a presentation.

From my point of view, the focused time that day paid off. The sitting and studying accomplished the task. I could not do the same routine every day. Even though I have found I can do it in stretches when I have more days and certain places have the materials I need, the variety of doing other things in my job helps.

I suppose this could be explained by being in a “flow state” as I focus intently on some subject I am interested in. It is also something I learned while conducting research. What do I need to look for when analyzing materials? What is the best way to organize my notes? What provides me the evidence I can then use later? Learning research methods involves forms of data collection and analysis but it also includes habits and dispositions and actions on the part of researchers.

Americans consume more media, sit more

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A recent study shows Americans are sitting more and connects this to increased media usage:

That’s what Yin Cao and an international group of colleagues wanted to find out in their latest study published in JAMA. While studies on sitting behavior in specific groups of people — such as children or working adults with desk jobs — have recorded how sedentary people are, there is little data on how drastically sitting habits have changed over time. “We don’t know how these patterns have or have not changed in the past 15 years,” says Cao, an assistant professor in public health sciences at the Washington University School of Medicine.

The researchers used data collected from 2001 to 2016 by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which asked a representative sample of Americans ages five and older how many hours they spent watching TV or videos daily in the past month, and how many hours they spent using a computer outside of work or school. The team analyzed responses from nearly 52,000 people and also calculated trends in the total time people spent sitting from 2007 to 2016. Overall, teens and adults in 2016 spent an average of an hour more each day sitting than they did in 2007. And most people devoted that time parked in front of the TV or videos: in 2016, about 62% of children ages five to 11 spent two or more hours watching TV or videos every day, while 59% of teens and 65% of adults did so. Across all age groups, people also spent more time in 2016 using computers when they were not at work or school compared to 2003. This type of screen time increased from 43% to 56% among children, from 53% to 57% among adolescents and from 29% to 50% among adults…

The increase in total sitting time is likely largely driven by the surge in time spent in front of a computer. As eye-opening as the trend data are, they may even underestimate the amount of time Americans spend sedentary, since the questions did not specifically address time spent on smartphones. While some of this time might have been captured by the data on time spent watching TV or videos, most people spend additional time browsing social media and interacting with friends via texts and video chats — much of it while sitting.

Does this mean the Holy Grail of media is screentime that requires standing and/or walking around to avoid sitting too much? Imagine a device that requires some movement to work. This does not have to be a pedal powered gaming console or smartphone but perhaps just a smartphone that needs to move 100 feet every five minutes to continue. (Then imagine the workarounds, such as motorized scooter while watching a screen a la Wall-E.)

Of course, the answer might be to just consume less media content on screens. This might prove difficult. Nielsen reports American adults consume 11 hours of media a day. Even as critics have assailed television, films, and Internet and social media content, Americans still choose (and are pushed as well) to watch more.