Contributions and Challenges in Health Lifestyles Research

The concept of health lifestyles is moving scholarship beyond individual health behaviors to integrated bundles of behaviors undergirded by group-based identities and norms. Health lifestyles research merges structure with agency, individual-level processes with group-level processes, and multifaceted behaviors with norms and identities, shedding light on why health behaviors persist or change and on the reproduction of health disparities and other social inequalities. Recent contributions have applied new methods and life course perspectives, articulating health lifestyles’s dynamic relationships to social contexts and demonstrating their implications for health and development. Culturally focused work has shown how health lifestyles function as signals for status and identity and perpetuate inequalities. We synthesize literature to articulate recent advances and challenges and demonstrate how health lifestyles research can strengthen health policies and inform scholarship on inequalities. Future work emphasizing health lifestyles’s collective nature and attending to upstream social structures will further elucidate complex social processes.