Online and offline leisure, relatedness and psychological distress: a study of young people in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Depression and psychological distress have high incidence rates among young people. Leisure is a known determinant of health and well-being and can help mitigate these phenomena through a variety of mechanisms. While it is known that sport and exercise provide benefits for neurological functioning, leisure has received less attention as a means of mobilising social networks and cultivating relatedness, a known factor protecting mental health. From a sample of 891 young adults in Switzerland, we grouped twenty online and offline leisure activities into seven different dimensions, testing their associations with perceptions of support from relatives and friends (relatedness), and with a composite index of psychological distress. Our results help to determine those face-to-face experiences, such as sport and social activities, that most help to cultivate support through close ties, which in turn seems to make them important for increased levels of mental health. The results indicate that screen-based leisure activities do not promote relatedness. However, psychological distress is linked with only some forms of media-based leisure, such as online chatting, presumably because depressive moods lead to networks being mobilised through online engagement rather than face-to-face interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure
• youth
• mental health
• social capital
• Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial assistance. Our thanks goes to Annahita Ehsan for her helpful suggestions about the links between leisure and mental health and to Robert Parkin for his valuable work in revising this text.

Data availability statement

The data used for this study are available free of charge after signing a user agreement (https://forscenter.ch/projects/swiss-household-panel/data/).

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1. Social capital has been defined as ‘(…) the extent of diversity of resources embedded in one’s network’ (Lin, 2001, p. 3). Conceptualised as collective attribute, e.g., in Putnam’s works, or as individual attribute, e.g., Bourdieu (1986) or Lin (2001), social capital express in different connotations the idea that networks of relations provide a variety of resources that are determinant for many aspects of individual and social life, including labour market outcomes, health or political issues (see Rostila, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This publication benefited from the support of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number: 51NF40-160590).

Notes on contributors

Mattia Vacchiano

Mattia Vacchiano (http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4916-8723) is PhD in Sociology at Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona. Currently, he is senior SNF researcher at the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES of the University of Lausanne. His current research uses a social capital lens to study vulnerabilities among young people, including labour precarization and mental health issues. His methodological tools include both qualitative and quantitative techniques within the Social Network Analysis (SNA) operational framework.

Danilo Bolano

Danilo Bolano (http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8698-0633) is a social demographer and statistician. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences awarded at University of Geneva (CH). His research interests include life course and health inequalities.