Habits in Context: A Synthesis,with Implications for Research in Occupational Science

Abstract

Habits, rather than being mundane or trivial, are significant learned behaviors embedded in an ecocultural context (of time, place, and society) with which they engage in a dialectical relationship. Habits enable or frustrate adaptation to environmental challenges. In a positive mode, habits relate to personal meaning, identity, competence, satisfaction, and self-expression. The study of habits requires adoption of an ethical, scholarly, and holistic approach. Occupational science needs to continue its investigation and synthesis of interdisciplinary knowledge about habits, including identification of the environmental conditions that further occupation; the “affordances” (environmental potentials for action) that provide occupational resources; the habit patterns that contribute to health, and to identification and reclamation of people's strengths, capabilities, and interests; the process of learning of new habits; reconstruction of the self through habit change; and the relationship of engagement in occupation to being in place in one's ecoculture. Such study may require that occupational scientists critically assess their epistemological assumptions and research approaches.