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The relevance of physical fitness for children’s and adolescents’ health is indisputable and it is crucial to regularly assess and evaluate children’s and adolescents’ individual physical fitness development to detect potential negative health consequences in time. Physical fitness tests are easy-to-administer, reliable, and valid which is why they should be widely used to provide information on performance development and health status of children and adolescents. When talking about development of physical fitness, two perspectives can be distinguished. One perspective is how the physical fitness status of children and adolescents changed / developed over the past decades (i.e., secular trends). The other perspective covers the analyses how physical fitness develops with increasing age due to growth and maturation processes. Although, the development of children’s and adolescents’ physical fitness has been extensively described and analyzed in the literature, still some questions remain to be uncovered that will be addressed in the present doctoral thesis.
Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have examined secular trends in children’s and adolescents’ physical fitness. However, considering that those analyses are by now 15 years old and that updates are available only to limited components of physical fitness, it is time to re-analyze the literature and examine secular trends for selected components of physical fitness (i.e., cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle strength, proxies of muscle power, and speed). Fur-thermore, the available studies on children’s development of physical fitness as well as the ef-fects of moderating variables such as age and sex have been investigated within a long-term ontogenetic perspective. However, the effects of age and sex in the transition from pre-puberty to puberty in the ninth year of life using a short-term ontogenetic perspective and the effect of timing of school enrollment on children’s development of physical fitness have not been clearly identified. Therefore, the present doctoral thesis seeks to complement the knowledge of children’s and adolescents’ physical fitness development by updating secular trend analysis in selected components of physical fitness, by examining short-term ontogenetic cross-sectional developmental differences in children`s physical fitness, and by comparing physical fitness of older- and younger-than-keyage children versus keyage-children. These findings provide valuable information about children’s and adolescents’ physical fitness development to help prevent potential deficits in physical fitness as early as possible and consequently ensure a holistic development and a lifelong healthy life.
Initially, a systematic review to provide an ‘update’ on secular trends in selected components of physical fitness (i.e., cardiorespiratory endurance, relative muscle strength, proxies of muscle power, speed) in children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis statement guidelines. To examine short-term ontogenetic cross-sectional developmental differences and to compare physical fitness of older- and younger-than-keyage children versus keyage-children physical fitness data of 108,295 keyage-children (i.e., aged 8.00 to 8.99 years), 2,586 younger-than-keyage children (i.e., aged 7.00 to 7.99 years), and 26,540 older-than-keyage children (i.e., aged 9.00 to 9.99 years) from the third grade were analyzed. Physical fitness was assessed through the EMOTIKON test battery measuring cardiorespiratory endurance (i.e., 6-min-run test), coordina-tion (i.e., star-run test), speed (i.e., 20-m linear sprint test), and proxies of lower (i.e., standing long jump test) and upper limbs (i.e., ball-push test) muscle power. Statistical inference was based on Linear Mixed Models.
Findings from the systematic review revealed a large initial improvement and an equally large subsequent decline between 1986 and 2010 as well as a stabilization between 2010 and 2015 in cardiorespiratory endurance, a general trend towards a small improvement in relative muscle strength from 1972 to 2015, an overall small negative quadratic trend for proxies of muscle power from 1972 to 2015, and a small-to-medium improvement in speed from 2002 to 2015. Findings from the cross-sectional studies showed that even in a single prepubertal year of life (i.e., ninth year) physical fitness performance develops linearly with increasing chronological age, boys showed better performances than girls in all physical fitness components, and the components varied in the size of sex and age effects. Furthermore, findings revealed that older-than-keyage children showed poorer performance in physical fitness compared to keyage-children, older-than-keyage girls showed better performances than older-than-keyage boys, and younger-than-keyage children outperformed keyage-children.
Due to the varying secular trends in physical fitness, it is recommended to promote initiatives for physical activity and physical fitness for children and adolescents to prevent adverse effects on health and well-being. More precisely, public health initiatives should specifically consider exercising cardiorespiratory endurance and muscle strength because both components showed strong positive associations with markers of health. Furthermore, the findings implied that physical education teachers, coaches, or researchers can utilize a proportional adjustment to individually interpret physical fitness of prepubertal school-aged children. Special attention should be given to the promotion of physical fitness of older-than-keyage children because they showed poorer performance in physical fitness than keyage-children. Therefore, it is necessary to specifically consider this group and provide additional health and fitness programs to reduce their deficits in physical fitness experienced during prior years to guarantee a holistic development.
Der französische Autor Michel Houellebecq und sein literarisches Werk sorgen in der medialen Öffentlichkeit regelmäßig für Skandale, die Vorwürfe reichen von bewusster Provokation bis hin zu diversen Diskriminierungen. Dabei unterstützt Houellebecq durch seine mediale Selbstinszenierung die Verwischung zwischen sich selbst als realer Person und den Erzählstimmen seiner Texte. Dies führt auch in der Literaturwissenschaft zu wiederholten Versuchen, dem Schriftsteller und seinen Romanen eine politische Position zuzuschreiben.
Im Gegensatz dazu ist das Ziel dieser Abschlussarbeit, am Beispiel des 2015 bei Flammarion publizierten Romans Soumission – welchem neben Misogynie auch Islam- und Homofeindlichkeit vorgeworfen wurde –, herauszustellen, wie der Text Widerstände gegen konkrete politische Positionierungen und starre Bedeutungszuschreibungen aufweist. Über eine Analyse der Männlichkeits- und Weiblichkeitsentwürfe im Sinne dekonstruktiver Gendertheorien sowie über eine intertextuelle und postkoloniale Perspektivierung werden die Ambivalenz und das provokative Potential des Textes herausgearbeitet. Das intertextuelle Verweisspiel des Romans und die Systemreferenz zur Décadence, besonders durch Bezüge zu Einzeltexten und zur Biografie des Autors Joris-Karl Huysmans, bilden eine wichtige Grundlage sowohl für das zentrale Thema der religiösen Konversion, die textimmanente Bedeutung der Literatur, als auch für die Geschlechterkonstruktionen. Trotz der Stereotypisierung von Frauenfiguren, deren gesellschaftlicher Wert vom sexuellen Begehren eines Mannes abhängt, oder der orientalistischen Darstellung des Islams entwirft Soumission eine komplexe Inszenierung von Männlichkeitsvorstellungen. Dies zeigt sich in der verunsicherten männlichen Identität des Protagonisten François, die zwischen universalem Anspruch und individueller Einzigartigkeit changiert und gleichzeitig, wie auch jene von anderen männlichen Figuren, eine strikte, stereotype Geschlechterbinarität unterläuft. Die Verunsicherung der Identität des Protagonisten spiegelt die der französischen Gesellschaft wider, dabei verfügen nur der fiktive Islam und dessen Genderpolitik über ausreichend Stärke, dem kulturellen Verfall des Westens etwas entgegenzusetzen. Der religiösen Konversion zum Islam wird eine korrektive und erlösende Funktion zugeschrieben, die in dem Akt der Unterwerfung ihren Höhepunkt findet.
In den Translationsprozessen von französischer, christlich geprägter in eine muslimisch fundierte Kultur offenbart sich nicht nur ein Angriff auf die akademische Bildungselite Frankreichs, sondern auch auf das Wissen der Literatur. Indem eine Re- und Uminterpretation literarischer Texte durch den Protagonisten und weitere Figuren für die neue fundamentalistische Gesellschaftsordnung vorgenommen wird, offenbart sich neben binären Geschlechterkonstruktionen und diversen politischen Positionierungen auch das nationale Narrativ der französischen Literatur als labile Fiktion.