Socially Patterned Strategic Complementarity between Offline Leisure Activities and Internet Practices among Young People

Abstract

While research exists regarding the internet’s influence on traditional forms of youth leisure, research based on a comprehensive set of leisure indicators is scattered. We explore how a set of young peoples’ in-person leisure activities are complemented by their internet practices, using a canonical correlation framework to estimate the relationship between leisure activities and internet practices. We also measure how internet practices vary depending on the social properties of young people. We find that a strategic complementarity exists between certain offline leisure activities and specific online internet practices, in particular, that in-person social leisure is complemented by social interaction over the internet, that in-person cultural leisure is complemented by online information-seeking and asynchronous communication practices, and that in-home gaming is complemented by software and associated downloads. This strategic complementarity, furthermore, is also socially patterned, primarily by gender.

Keywords:

• Canonical correlation analysis
• Internet
• leisure
• strategic complementarity
• Young people

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the Agencia Catalana de la Joventut for giving us access to the 2017 youth survey, and three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their helpful comments. Ailish Maher assisted with the English proof-reading of this article. We assume full responsibility for the claims made in the manuscript. 

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

Grant #2017 SGR 1056 funded by AGAUR-Generalitat de Catalunya, and Grant #870691-INVENT funded by the EU H2020 program. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: research grant #2017-SGR-1056 funded by AGAUR (Catalan research funding agency) and the Business Department Research Funds, School of Economics and Business, UAB.