Leisure in Youth University Lifestyle. Prospects and Trends Among Audiences Brazilian, Portuguese and South African

Leisure is a human activity, which represents the need to enjoy, ludically the social practices constituted culturally (Gomes, 2014). It is developed without commitment with predetermined tasks being understood as one free of social obligations. The lifestyle is the set of practices influenced by the position of social classes, literacy, values, economic power, gender, age, profession and address, being the leisure a component of people’s lifestyle, constituted by individual habitus. The youth constitute their own lifestyle, culturally established or assimilated (Pais, 1996). It also seeks to reflect their habits, their customs, and interests in everyday actions. Our objective was to know the youth’s lifestyle in their leisure, according to their conceptions. We used electronic questionnaires with university students (36% from Lisbon-Portugal, 57% from Belo Horizonte-Brazil, 8% from Cape Town-South Africa). 705 from 1220 questionnaires were answered. We analyzed profile, leisure conceptions and lifestyle using the software SPSS. There are common among young people of the three countries go out with friends and surf the internet. On the understanding of lifestyle as an action determined by the social knowledge, which alternate as desires and manifest themselves in various fields. Young people have styles of their own and peculiar life in every country and every culture, use is made of public spaces and reframe according to their interests and availability. The lifestyle can be turned on and endorsed by the cultural capital versus financial capital to meet the determination of practices. Even in so distant and different cultures, we see similar interest in young people, showing that globalization and the cultural industry, especially the entertainment is of great value and influence in contemporary human formation. While we understand leisure as self-determined practice, we recognize that is the result of society, thus underlining the differences initially shown in this study.