Biological Measures of Human Experience Across the Lifespan ― Making Visible the Invisible

?The proposed volume explores methods used by social scientists and human biologists to understand fundamental aspects of human experience. It is organized by stages of the human lifespan: beginnings, adulthood, and aging. Explored are particular kinds of experiences - including pain, stress, activity levels, sleep quality, memory, and menopausal hot flashes - that have traditionally relied upon self-reports, but are subject to inter-individual differences in self-awareness or culture-based notions of what experiences to note or report. We also examine other ways in which normally “invisible” phenomena can be made visible, such as the caloric content of foods, blood pressure, fecundity, growth, nutritional status, genotypes, and bone health. All of the chapters in this book address the means by which social scientists and human biologists measure subjective and objective experience.

Lynnette Leidy Sievert is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has international recognition for her cross-cultural studies of women at mid-life. Her work includes both quantitative and qualitative measures, and her human biology background has enabled her to integrate biological and anthropological approaches to understanding this critical period in women’s lives. She is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Human Biology Association and on the Board of Trustees of the North American Menopause Society. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and Menopause: A Biocultural Perspective, published by Rutgers University Press in 2006.?