Sleep, Physical Activity and Beliefs. A socio-ecological approach based on the Universanté research
Résumé
Sleep can be defined as a periodically necessary and specific neurophysiological condition. All animal beings sleep to get the essential energy needed to live. Sleep is characterized by suppression of consciousness, reduced muscle tone, decreased heart and respiratory rate.
The interaction between sociology and the world of sleep has always been difficult and controversial. The activities of sleeping and dreaming have always been the prerogative of some specific disciplines as neurophysiology or psychology. Roger Bastide, who has always been attentive to the world of imagination and to the Other, writes in one of his books “for Sociology, interested only in the man awake, the sleeper might as well be dead [...] The question I have asked myself is whether the sociologist is right to ignore the other half of our life, to envisage man standing and sitting but never asleep and adream”. The recent studies of some sociologist, as Simon J. Williams or Bernard Lahire, started opening this perspective
Starting from the idea that the interaction between sociology and sleep is complex and problematic, we hypothesize that we can analyse the interaction between sleep, physical activity, social inequalities and beliefs in a complete and comprehensive manner only if we base on a socio-ecological perspective. In this communication we will introduce and discuss the first results of the Universanté research, based on a panel of 700 university students of the Opal Coast area (France) focusing on the social-constructed beliefs and on the interaction between sleep, physical activity and social inequalities