Body Clock
The BANDS Inventory
Living and working in modern industrial societies are not constrained by seasonal variations as they are among pastoral or once were among hunters and gatherers. Shift work, for example, has been with us for a long time. Nowadays, people travel over time zones to do business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The phenomenon known as "the 24/7 society" is a reality. to help people relate their own biological dispositions to their life styles in the new millennium, a self-report inventory has been produced to show adaptability among four well-established pathways. Once awareness of personal adaptation styles becomes apparent, occupational choices can be made with them in mind. This is how BANDS works.
Constructing the BANDS Scales.
In all forms of life there is a response to degrees of light and darkness, which can be called Biological Adaptation to Night and Day Situations. These initials (B.A.N.D.S) form the name of this inventory for use with normal people. Human beings have a cycle of response that covers a 24 hour period, unlike many species of plants and birds, whose growth or migration cycles are seasonal. There are four sources of influence on adaptation patterns of individuals, apart from body chemistry, which we take for granted.
Activity Levels
First, there is a daily cycle of high and low levels of activity. There are two high periods, morning and evening. There also tend to be two low periods, one in the afternoon and one when it is time to go to bed and sleep. The whole pattern is called a circadian (day-around) rhythm , from the latin words circa (around) and die (day). A circadian rhythm is defined formally as a self-sustained biological rhythm, which in a natural environment normally has a period of approximately 24 hours.
Morning and Evening Styles.
Within the 24 hour circadian rhythm cycle of human beings, light and darkness tend to regulate when the periods of high and low activity begin and end; but that is not the whole story. Some people are more active in the morning than in the evening; and some are more active in the evening than in the morning. Two broad, and not necessarily exclusive tendencies are known - a morning and an evening style of behaviour. Some say they are "morning persons" and others say they are "evening persons" but these are relative, not absolute classifications. Of the four influences on activity, these two styles are the most commonly referred to and assessed.
Sleep Debt Account
The third major factor that influences when we can perform at our best is the need to sleep. Eventually, people have to sleep,. The amount of sleep over a period of time is like a bank account. There are people who regularly build up a sleep debt and then have to bring the account into balance. They pay off the debt by making up for lost sleep. When the sleep debt account is in credit, performance at work and play is fine. if the account is in debt for a long time, then things go wrong, mistakes are likely, and life gets hard to cope with. Young doctors with long periods of hospital duty tend to have very marked overdrafts in their sleep accounts. So do people who "burn the candle at both ends". Our folk sayings recognised the problem long before scientists thought it worthy of study and appraisal.
The Body Clock
The body clock's times for waking, working, playing, eating and sleeping are not only a matter of biology organising brain chemicals to make the body do certain things at the same time everyday of our lives. Habits are formed throughout life by interactions with events. In turn, these habits interact with our systems to produce body clocks that vary. We do not all dance in time to the same tune. Body clocks can be very regular, in that they keep strict time, or variable, where there is no underlying need or disposition to do everything at the same time every day.
The Four BANDS Scales
To measure these attributes and dispositions, an inventory of four short scales was constructed, each scale being based on one of the four major factors affecting ability to focus on the tasks in hand.
BANDS Morning Style: A preference for doing things early in the day.
BANDS Evening Style: A preference for doing things later in the day or in the evening.
BANDS Sleep Debt Account: Tendency to accumulate a sleep debt on a regular basis.
BANDS Regular vs. Variable Body Clock: A preference for doing things a the same time every day, or for doing things in no fixed time schedules.
Scoring and Reporting
The scales are scored in two ways:
First, the strength of endorsement of the items in each scale. The tendency to agree or disagree in a specific direction.
This is called a CRED or credibility rating.
The ratings used are simple, giving three classes of response: Decisive, Apparent and Equivocal. They refer to they ways in which the items on the scale have been endorsed. For example, a Decisive rating means at least 9 of the items have been positively endorsed. An Equivocal rating is a 50/50 split in the direction of agreement.
The NOT catagories are derived from how often participants do not agree with the items in each scale.
Alongside this rating is the standing or rank from 100 down to 1 (called a percentile rank) showing what proportion of people score higher or lower than the individual on any one of the four scales.
Reporting is kept to a minimum, giving summary comments on the importance of the results.
BANDS Response Styles:
Item response patterns vary from narrow , where a limited choice of options is exercised, for example, someone only responding Often or Sometimes , to wide, where the whole range of choices from Always to Never tends to be used.
In the computer delivered (CD) version, individual response patterns are reported, using five catagories and reporting the percentile rank. These are useful indicators of variability and attention should be given to the potentially distorting effects of very narrow and very wide response patterns.
