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In Search of the Harried Leisure Class in Contemporary Society: Time-Use Surveys and Patterns of Leisure Time Consumption

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Abstract

In trying to understand the contemporary work-leisure paradoxes, we go in search for today’s harried leisure class and its equanimous counterpart. We apply the relative new method of optimal matching on the continuous time-use data of the pooled Flemish time-use survey of 1999 and 2004, in order to identify different time-use patterns based on one’s leisure time consumption. We then analyse these time-use patterns by combining a multiple classification analysis with socio-demographic measures and (leisure) time-use characteristics, which allows us to identify today’s harried leisure class on the one hand the opposite “equanimous leisure class” on the other hand. It turns out that the members of today’s harried leisure class combine a great amount of cultural and material resources with the experience of time pressure and voracious and volatile leisure time consumption, whereas the members of the equanimous leisure class mainly consume their leisure time in front of the TV. Typifying these groups based on their consumption characteristics provides useful evidence for the integration of time use in the research field of consumer policy.

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Notes

  1. Unless stated otherwise, by “consumption,” we mean the act of engaging with material objects for which at least one of the three resources (cultural, economic, or social) is needed. In addition, by “leisure time consumption” or “spending leisure time,” we mean using time to engage in leisure activities including both consumption and social participation.

  2. These tests include, inter alia, a comparison of both datasets on technical aspects (comparing unspecified time, starting days of the registration cycle, and spread of the fieldwork over the year of gathering the data), on socio-demographic characteristics (comparing age, gender, education, political preference, and time pressure), and on time-use in terms of different activities (for more details, see Glorieux et al. 2005).

  3. Since income is highly correlated with the educational level, we only present the latter as an indicator for both one’s cultural and economic resources in Table 1.

  4. To compare 1 day for 2,285 respondents implies making more than 2.6 million pairwise comparisons to construct the dissimilarity matrix of size (2,285 × 2,284)/2. When more sequences are to be compared, the dissimilarity matrix grows exponentially. If we were to compare 7 days for the same number of respondents, almost 128 million pairwise comparisons would be necessary. While doing these pairwise comparisons is not in itself a problem (only computer time will increase), standard (high-end) computer equipment cannot allocate enough memory to build the resulting—very large—matrix, which is needed for further analyses.

  5. Later in our analyses, we will link the leisure time-use pattern during the week, with (aggregated) indicators of leisure time use during the weekend.

  6. Canonical correlation =  0.762, p < .001.

  7. These statements are two of the 14 statements that make up the measure of time pressure (see Appendix 2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology Department, Research Group TOR, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Ignace Glorieux, Ilse Laurijssen, Joeri Minnen & Theun Pieter van Tienoven

Authors
  1. Ignace Glorieux
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  2. Ilse Laurijssen
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  3. Joeri Minnen
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  4. Theun Pieter van Tienoven
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Theun Pieter van Tienoven.

Appendices

Appendix 1

The scale used to measure time pressure is based on 14 items from the individual questionnaire of the time-use survey:

  1. 1.

    Too much is expected from me.

  2. 2.

    I never get my work updated.

  3. 3.

    I never have time for myself.

  4. 4.

    For me, a day contains too few hours.

  5. 5.

    I have to cancel appointments often.

  6. 6.

    I have to do more than I am capable of.

  7. 7.

    I do not have enough time to do what I have to do.

  8. 8.

    More is expected of me than I can handle.

  9. 9.

    During my leisure time, I do not get to do what I want to do.

  10. 10.

    During my leisure time, I have to take others into account too often.

  11. 11.

    I find it hard to relax during my leisure time.

  12. 12.

    It is too hard for me to schedule my leisure activities.

  13. 13.

    There are so many things I want to do during my leisure time that I often have the feeling of running out of time.

  14. 14.

    Too many of my leisure activities are fragmented.

All questions are measured on a five points Likert-scale varying from total agreement to total disagreement. An explorative component analysis brings forward a consistent one-dimensional, underlying structure. For a better understanding of the results of our analysis, we have not used the scores of the factor analysis, but transformed them to a scale of sums with a minimum of zero and a maximum of 100 (Moens 2006).

Appendix 2

To measure the resemblance between the different days of the week, we created a measure of resemblance based on the temporal pattern of time spent on leisure activities versus non-leisure activities. Firstly, we compared how many of the 10-min time intervals of each day contained the same use of time. Secondly, we divided the number of equal time-use intervals by 144 (i.e., the total number of 10-min time intervals for 1 day) to normalize our measure of resemblance (i.e., the proportion of time with the same time use). Table 3 contains these normalized values.

Table 3 Average resemblance of the 7 days of the week in terms of the temporal pattern of leisure time
Full size table

We find that Sunday is completely different from the other days and that the temporal pattern of leisure time is more or less the same for all weekdays. Saturday falls somewhat in between.

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Glorieux, I., Laurijssen, I., Minnen, J. et al. In Search of the Harried Leisure Class in Contemporary Society: Time-Use Surveys and Patterns of Leisure Time Consumption. J Consum Policy 33, 163–181 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-010-9124-7

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