Young People's Leisure Patterns: Testing Social Age, Social Gender and Linguistic Capital Hypotheses

In this research we are interested in uncovering young people leisure patterns to study whether they are structured by the age and gender as the youth culture thesis proposes or its relation to young people leisure patterns is mediated by a set of social position indicators as the sociology of culture predicts. Were the former the case found, then no young people leisure policy would be necessary, but in the latter case, we would need a young people's leisure policy in order to try to balance the variations in leisure patterns related to young people different social positions.

Our data came from the 2012 Catalan Young People’s Survey, EJC12. The interviewees were asked about the leisure activities they participated in by choosing between a list of 32 activities as well as a set of sociodemographic indicators. We applied MCA to the set of leisure activities to uncover the leisure habits of Young people. Then we clustered them to identify their patterns of leisure and finally we used a multilevel model to test the social age, social gender and linguistic capital hypotheses.

We found that leisure practices could be classified in 3 habitus: doing leisure activities, cultural activities and social/entertainment activities. Young people combine the three leisure habitus differently, forming 4 patterns of leisure: a social, an omnivorous, an entertainment, and a religious pattern. The association of leisure patterns with the indicators social position suggests that when we take into account the mediating role of social position, the main effects of age, gender, and linguistic practices vanish, as predicted by the three hypotheses proposed. That is, young people leisure practices are socially differentiated with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the focus of youth leisure policy.