Young people’s leisure patterns: testing social age, social gender, and linguistic capital hypotheses

ABSTRACT

We analysed young people’s leisure activities in order to identify their leisure habitus, discover how they combined activities into leisure patterns, and examine how leisure patterns were socially structured. We argue that the effects of age, gender, and language on how young people’s leisure patterns are structured are mediated by social class. We found that leisure practices could be classified in terms of three habitus: the frequent leisure habitus, the cultural activity habitus, and the social vs. entertainment habitus. The different combinations of these three leisure habitus by young people resulted in four patterns which we refer to as social, omnivorous, entertainment, and religious leisure patterns. The association of leisure patterns with indicators of social position suggests that, as predicted by our theoretical framework, age, gender, and language effects are diminished once we take into account the mediating role of social class. Young people’s leisure practices are therefore socially differentiated, with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the particular focus of youth leisure policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• leisure patterns
• vulnerable groups
• sociology of leisure

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, and the editors of this journal for their constructive criticism. Ailish Maher assisted with the English edition of this manuscript. We assume full responsibility for the claims made in the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Jordi López-Sintas http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5441-4039

Abaghan Ghahraman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2908-5007

Notes

1. According to Kelly, the meaning of leisure is in the actor’s mind rather than associated with activities (1982, 22).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the European Union ERDF [grant number CSO2016-78812-R]; the Commission for Universities and Research of the Catalan Ministry of Innovation, Universities and Enterprises [grant number 2014-SGR-502]; and the Centre for Studies and Research in Humanities.