2018 Volume 31 Issue 3 Pages 89-102
Environmental problems like climate change and depletion of resources force us to live under severe environmental constraints. To have subjective well-being in lifestyle in our daily lives under such circumstances requires knowledge of those elements of subjective well-being in lifestyle that will help us find the structure of subjective well-being in lifestyle. However, there are no useful methods for analyzing lifestyles in terms of various elements of human activities, social context, cultural context, and environmental constraints. This paper investigated a technique for specifying the structure of such a lifestyle, using a method from ontology engineering which has been used for the functional decomposition of artifacts. To specify the lifestyle structure, this research used data describing lifestyles in the 1940s when people also lived under severe environmental constraints. The action decomposition trees of lifestyles were made with actions, ways and implicit goals and the original tree was enhanced by adding elements of subjective well-being nodes to relate the actions to subjective well-being in lifestyle. This study demonstrated that an action decomposition tree based on ontology engineering could be promising for explicating hidden conceptual elements and for facilitating communication among researchers about lifestyles. This is the first paper describing a new technique of lifestyle analysis.
