Gedvilienė, Jolanta

Background. Socio-cultural pressure exerted by the environment and the media makes the majority of women take care of their bodies. That is especially true in Western culture which promotes slimmer women in recent decades. Methods. Two questionnaires were used in this research: Body Shape Questionnaire and Sense of Coherence scale. Research participants were 79 women aged 34.6 ± 3.76 years. Results. After six months of regular fitness classes women’s satisfaction of their body and their sense coherence level improved significantly. Relations between body shape dissatisfaction and sense of coherence, body shape dissatisfaction and manageability, comprehensibility and manageability were found. Conclusions. Systematic fitness training positively affects women’s satisfaction with their body. Understanding of the capability of controlling their body shape was improved. There was a significant relationship between dissatisfaction with their body shape and sense of coherence. The effect of physical activity improved the values of all three components of the sense of coherence construct. The values of comprehensibility, meaningfulness and manageability indicators show that respondents may already have a better control of their sense of coherence.

Conclusion. Physical Education teachers tend to subjectively better evaluate the contemporary realities of physical education classes compared to students. Teachers more often indicated that they applied independent work in their lessons, and thought that the lesson content met the needs of the students and led enough to unconventional physical activity and healthy lifestyle. Students more often pointed out that teachers never assessed them according to their progress in the development of their physical qualities and knowledge during lessons. In the opinions of teachers and students, physical fitness test results are still common evaluation criteria in the lessons.

Today we live in a changing world. Values, attitudes, our thinking paradigms are changing. At this stage of changing paradigms of thought, it is useful to examine the extent of scientific articles in which the concepts representing the new science are used in the best said databases of scientific articles, and how these concepts are used (if we attempt to define them, describe their context, or just mention them). It is also useful to examine in what areas of science we can mostly find reflections of new science, exploring, in what areas of science the concepts of new science are mostly used. It is likely that the new science is rapidly evolving through scientific articles. After the conceptual overview of the cognition of the new science and one of the key concepts representing it, the paper aims to explore how often (under quantitative aspect) and how (under qualitative aspect) these concepts are used in research articles, and in what areas the concept of science is used most often. Applied research methods are systematic and logical analysis of changes in science and new science as well as empirical analysis of the content and quantity of the documents. The main conclusion: the study confirms that the new science unfolds and evolves through scientific articles not only in technological, and physical or biomedical sciences, but also in the social sciences and the humanities. So paradigmatic changes are taking place in all areas.