Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The article focuses on the drinking habits of Swedish higher education students at the beginning of the 21st century. The main aim of the research is to determine the traditions of alcohol consumption. In February and March 2021, a quantitative survey was conducted, with interviews among 96 students who had studied or were still studying in Sweden. The article presents the most common occasions on which students choose to consume alcohol, and discusses students’ choices of strong alcoholic beverages and their attitudes about alcohol consumption at student festivals and on other occasions. The research reveals that the pressure to consume alcohol is felt from friends. However, the consumption of strong alcoholic beverages is not evaluated negatively at student festivals.

Wherewith actualisation of health promotion as an important aspect in the context of public health maintenance, the questions which are connected to public joint responsibility in their health maintenance and improvement attain even greater importance. Taking into consideration the insufficient health quality of Latvian population which ranks Latvia in one of the last places among the European countries, actualisation and implementation of individual responsibility dimension in the health care financing model, is viewed as a possibility of improvement of the current situation. The research overlooked the approaches of individual responsibility integration in health care models employed by the developed countries, classifying those several parameters, established the insufficient Latvian population involvement level which is characterised by large health influencing harmful habit prevalence and low involvement level in illness prevention measures, as well as marked the main challenges and possibilities, introducing individual responsibility dimension in Latvian health care financing model which are referred to both increasing the payment solidarity and lifestyle and behaviour changes.

The spectrum of the links between the quality of life and health has been expanding due to the phenomenon of health acquiring features of a social phenomenon and growing complexity. The research evidenced that health was considered to be one of the most important, and often the most important, dimension of the quality of life. To more comprehensively identify the health-related factors that affected the quality of life in general, the concept of the health-related quality of life has been developed. In our research 1763 children filled KIDSCREEN52 surveys which evidence tendency as follows: even though two thirds of the children did not indicate they had health disorders, only one third of them assessed their health as excellent and very good. This demonstrates that, in the children’s assessment of health, both the absence of a disease or disability and also psychological and social factors are important.

This paper explores the relationship between paternal religious affiliation, practice, and health behavior, namely consumption of alcohol. This research models alcohol consumption as an aggregate sum of weekly glasses of wine, 50 ml vodka shots, half-liter bottles of beer, and cocktails. The model includes religious confession among other independent variables including self-reported health status. In confessional comparison, the largest fraction, Catholic, is the reference category opposite Orthodox, Protestant, Other non-affiliated believers and Atheist. Significantly, Other believers and Lithuanian Protestants consumed significantly more alcohol than Catholic respondents. A unit increase in prayer or religious reading did not significantly predict a change in alcohol consumption. However a unit increase in weekly work hours significantly decreases alcohol consumption in contrast to a unit increase in time spent with children. Higher consumption is associated with lower self-reported health status.

The proclamation to the Polish nation on 14 (1) August 1914 signed by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich has interested more than one researcher. Researchers from Russia and other countries routinely refer to the document in their analysis of the Polish question. However, the proclamation itself has not been an object of research for a long time, although the circumstances of its appearance, its content, and its multiple political consequences might contribute not only to an analysis of the Polish question, but also, in a more general sense, to studies of the national question in the Russian Empire. The paper deals with the history of the proclamation to the Polish nation, the reasons for its appearance, and the characteristics of the text. It analyses the issue of its authorship, and the impact of the proclamation on general public feeling, and also discusses the consideration of the Polish question in the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire during the First World War.