Locating leisure as the route to well-being: challenges of researching women’s leisure in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the relation of leisure to subjective well-being by focusing on the language-based challenges during empirical research, which deeply impact upon both the substance of the data collected and its interpretation, thereby the knowledge that is produced on leisure. Drawing upon the empirical data collected via qualitative methods, the article seizes on the relationship between women’s free-time, labour, leisure and subjective well-being. The findings of the research suggest that the translation of leisure as ‘free time activities’ in Turkish creates serious challenges in researching women’s leisure. Women in this research understand leisure in multiple ways, such as an escape from boredom, a sphere of recuperation, pleasure and self-fulfilment which altogether represent their understanding of leisure as a route to their subjective well-being. Building on these findings, the article aims to highlight the importance of ethnographically guided qualitative research in uncovering both the meanings of and the interdependence between leisure and subjective well-being in both Turkey, the focus of the study, and other comparable societies around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure
• gender
• Turkey
• labour
• well-being
• free-time activities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Analysing Household Labour Force Statistics 2010, Buğra (2014, p. 157) states that ‘informal employment in Turkey reaches over 40 percent of total employment and in the case of women over 58 percent of their total employment.’ According to Global Gender Gap Report 2017 (p. 177), this rate is significantly higher in India reaching around 70%.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gökben Demirbaş

Gökben Demirbaş received her PhD degree from Sociology Department at the University of Glasgow in 2018 and currently a Research Assistant at Trakya University in Turkey. She is interested in urban sociology, in particular, gendered leisure spaces.