A person's interests, beliefs, actions, and behavioral orientations make up their lifestyle, whether they belong to a group or culture.[1][2] The term "a person's basic character as established early in childhood" was first used by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in his 1929 book The Case of Miss R.[3] Since 1961, data has been collected on the wider definition of lifestyle, which is a "way or style of living".[3] A person's lifestyle is influenced by both tangible and intangible elements. While intangible factors are more closely related to an individual's psychological characteristics, such as personal values, preferences, and outlooks, tangible factors are directly related to demographic variables, i.e., an individual's demographic profile.
Personal identity
An individual's opinions, manner of life, beliefs, or worldview are often reflected in their lifestyle. As a result, developing a lifestyle is a way to develop a sense of self and produce cultural icons that are meaningful to an individual. Not every element of a lifestyle is chosen voluntarily. The lifestyle options and the symbols that an individual can project onto others and themselves might be limited by the social and technological systems that surround them.[4]
Ways of living and social standing
Previous research on lifestyles focuses on analyzing the social structure and the relative roles of persons within it. With his concept of "emulation," Thorstein Veblen introduces this viewpoint by claiming that people adopt particular "schemes of life," and in particular, specific patterns of "conspicuous consumption," based on their desire to be different from those in social strata they perceive as inferior and their desire to emulate those in superior social strata. According to Max Weber, lifestyles are unique components of status groups that are closely linked to a dialectic of recognition of prestige. A person's lifestyle is the most obvious way that they can be distinguished from others in their own social class, and it particularly reveals the prestige that they feel they possess or are entitled to.
Lifestyles as mental models
The field of psychological analysis is the source of the method that views lifestyles as primarily thought patterns. A lifestyle was first conceptualized, beginning with Alfred Adler, as a type of personality, in which the set of guiding beliefs and principles that people adopt in their early years define a framework of judgment that guides their behavior for the rest of their lives. The analysis of lifestyles developed as values profiles later on, especially in Milton Rokeach's work, Arnold Mitchell's VALS research, and Lynn R. Kahle's LOV research. This led to the hypothesis that different models of hierarchically organized values scales could be identified, to which different population sectors correspond.
Lifestyles as modes of behavior
The analysis of lifestyles as action profiles is distinguished by its consideration of the action level as a constitutive factor rather than only as a simple derivative of lifestyles, or at the very least, as their collateral component. Initially, this viewpoint was primarily concerned with consumer behavior, viewing purchased goods as tangible representations of people's perceptions of their identities and social positions. The viewpoint then expanded to encompass a broader range of daily life, focusing - as in the works of authors like Joffre Dumazedier and Anthony Giddens - on how time is used, particularly for leisure activities, and attempting to examine the relationship between the active dimension of choice and the dimension of routine
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