Young People ’ s Leisure Time : Gender Differences

Over the last three decades, topics relating to young peoples leisure time have become increasingly more present in academic literature. Among the numerous studies that delve into this subject, results point towards a relationship between the way teenagers spend their leisure time and their gender. In this study we wanted to answer the question if gender differences were evident in the way secondary school students in Serbia spent their leisure time. This problem was not looked into in more detail among secondary school students in Serbia. We conducted a survey on a sample of 922 secondary school teenagers from the 1st to 4th grade (ages 15–19) from nine Serbian towns. Research in this field commonly uses the rating scale. In this paper we have constructed an instrument that represents a methodological innovation in approaching a particular set of problems. It was a questionnaire. The task was to name all the activities they participated in, and the time frame in which the activities took place, over the course of one weekday and the Saturday of the previous week. The activities which best differentiate these two groups of surveyed teenagers are: sports, studying, computer use, spending time at friends’ homes and grooming. We did not discover differences in participating in creative activities while foreign studies show that such activities are more typical for girls.

YOUNG PEOPLES LEISURE TIME: GENDER DIFFERENCES 200 However, a more narrow definition exists.Leisure time can be understood to mean time free of obligations, not only academic but also familial.In accordance with the narrower definition, the analysis of leisure time fails to include activities related to the school curriculum and a variety of family obligations.In the spirit of better understanding some authors (Ilišin, 2002) differentiate between the concepts of leisure time and leisure.Leisure time is a broader concept that includes the time that remains for young people outside of school.Leisure is a more narrow term that assumes time free of all duties.This distinction will be acknowledged in this work and we will be interested in leisure time.
Hendry et al. (Hendry, Shucksmith, Love, & Glendinning, 2005) make an interesting remark that alleges the "ecological" invalidity of numerous studies of leisure time.Namely, in studies of young peoples leisure time, researchers look for different activities that occupy their free time.In contrast, for young people, an essential characteristic of leisure time is actually inactivity.In other words, this is a period of time during the day when one does not do anything in particular; when, for example, one can "goof off", chat with friends, think or muse; exactly the types of activities that are often not the subject of research.Many researchers fail to register this quality of young peoples leisure time.
A way to bring order into this terminological disorder is to attempt to differently categorize types of leisure time.Usually, the division is based on the active-passive quality of time spent, whether the activities are organized by an adult or the child, how structured they are, and what are the activities that occur (Halpern, 2005).Thus, a particular vocabulary develops in research that describes different components of spare time but does not give any greater clarity to this term.

The importance of leisure time in young people's development
Besides the aforementioned increase in autonomy and independence of adolescents vis-à-vis their parents, an often remarked characteristic of this period is also an intense need to research multiple personal identities, or search for those which are fundamental and defining for a young person.Identity development is a process which extends over the course of an individual's entire life, but what takes place during adolescence is especially important because that is when a basis for further psychosocial development forms (Grotevant & Cooper, 2005).
What is the impact of leisure time on this process?Often the process of identity formation is viewed as testing and discovering of the various opportunities that are more or less available to young people (Hendry et al., 2005).Some theoreticians believe that identity is actually built by participating in different activities.Particularly important are those activities which stimulate intrinsic motivations (Coatsworth et al., 2005).Young people have greater freedom in the selection and structuring of their leisure time activities than in the rest of their everyday life, which is tightly structured by adults.This explains why their selection of leisure time activities is closer to their authentic interests and hence more closely associated with identity development.During this time, young people are able to, through the participation in various activities, try out new roles and lifestyles, and interact with individuals outside their parental home (Hendry et al., 2005) which enables them to identify themselves in relation to others.This kind of comparison is one of the basic mechanisms in the construction of social identity (Tajfel, 1982).
The leisure time of young people has long been an important issue because of how it is linked to different types of risky behavior.Numerous studies show that the way in which leisure time is spent is linked to how involved young people are in problematic (deviant) behavior, such as alcohol and drug abuse, bullying, and milder and more severe delinquent acts (Hawdon, 1999;Hirschi, 2002;Osgood & Anderson, 2004).While the time spent in activities related to family and school is considered a "protective factor", less structured activities with peers, without adult supervision, and especially leisure time spent passively in aimless activities (e.g."goofing off" with peers, driving cars for fun, nightlife and entertainment), is seen as a "risk factor" (Barnes, Hoffman, Welte, Farrell, & Dintcheff, 2007).

Differences in the way the sexes spend their leisure time
Established expectations, due to numerous reasons, link the gender variable to variables which operationalize young peoples behavior during their leisure time.Notably, although by definition the choice of activities during leisure time is much freer in comparison to the choice of activities during the "non-free" part of the day, perhaps it does not depend only on the personal preference of adolescents (Stebbins, 2005;Shildrick & MacDonald, 2006).Numerous factors affect adolescents' participation in the activities and hobbies which influence development (Shaw, Kleiber, & Caldwell, 1995;Philipp, 1998).People participate in certain activities after they, more or less consciously, consider participating in an activity and run it through a number of social filters.These filters include: age, gender, economic income and education (Hendry et al., 2005).
Researchers involved in studying identity development also highlight the important role of gender in the selection of leisure time activities.Grotevant (Grotevant & Cooper, 2005) makes a distinction between chosen and assigned aspects of identity.The assigned aspects of identity include gender, nationality and family status.Adolescents have little influence, in terms of power to choose, over these determining aspects of their life, which, unlike the chosen aspects, can very rarely be changed.Issues about gender and gender role attract great interest of scientists and are more and more present in public thoughts of developed countries (Devedžič, 2006).That is not unusual because gender represents one of the essential categories in social life (Taylor, Peplau, & Sears, 2006).Some scientists even assume that gender, i.e. society's expectations from a certain gender, significantly influences all segments of everyday life (Vivien, 2002) .
The Symbolic meanings of the terms 'woman' and 'man' and their social roles are culturally shaped and historically and spatially dependant (Devedžič, 2006).the influence of this aspect of identity on everyday functioning is closely linked to cultural-historical features of a certain society.For that reason, it is reasonable to analyze the link between this variable and the choice of activity for leisure time in Serbia and compare it to the findings from other parts of the world.social changes in former socialist countries may not be gender neutral (Paci, 2002) causing the deepening of gender inequality of women.It is interesting to check whether and how the life of the young in their leisure time in this specific environment is different in comparison to other countries.
In the Serbian academic literature on leisure time, there is no notable interest in analyzing the link betweeen these two variables and the way secondary school students spend their leisure time.Gender is usually one of easily accessible independent variables.The differences are usually only acknowledged and these issues are not further examined because it represents only one of lateral analyses.Our aim with this paper is to contribute to the examination of these issues.Namely, depending on particular issues chosen by researchers, they found the following differences: girls do sports less than boys (Ministarstvo omladine i sporta, 2008), they are more interested in ecology clubs (Stanišic, 2009) they are less prone to turning to some forms of risky behavior in their leisure time (Plut, Pešić, & Videnović, 2009), they have a more positive attitude towards school as an educational environment, and in their everyday life outside school they choose activities that support educational content (Polovina, 2009).Still, what is missing is to have in one place an analysis dedicated to the link between the higher frequency of more leisure-time activities and gender.In accordance with existing findings, we expect to find that girls are less prone to do sports, and more oriented towards school and extracurricular activities, but we do not know whether there are any other differences.
Theoretical assumptions on the importance of the way gender affects leisure time were empirically confirmed in numerous studies in developed countries (Aitchison, 2001).Some authors claim that paying attention to the differences between the sexes is an unavoidable theme in every study of leisure time (Harris, 2005).
The results of almost all studies indicate that, regardless of age, there is an inequality between the sexes, both in structure and amount of leisure that is available, as well as factors limiting the spending of leisure time (Shaw, 1994).In both cases, women are in an unequal position.As a rule, women are less involved in sports (Shores, 2005) and are less computer literate, therefore fewer options are available to them in ways of entertainment that is accessible through the Internet (Bryce, 2001).Given these results, it is justifiable to assume that in the youth population differences will exist in the ways leisure time is spent.
Researchers, while dealing with young people's spare time activities, encountered differences between the sexes even when it was not the primary topic of interest.
Let us highlight a few of the frequently discussed differences.Hofer and others (Hofer, Schmid, Fries, Živković, & Dietz, 2009), in a cross-cultural youth study on a sample of 15 year olds from five different countries, found that girls spend more time during the day studying.Girls' greater commitment to schoolwork is confirmed in other studies (Halpern, 2005).
Researchers who investigated involvement in youth sports also frequently encountered differences between girls and boys.Young men devote more time to active participation in sports and following sporting events (Miller Melnick, Barnes, Sabo, & Farrell, 2007;Cho, 2004;Passmore & French, 2001;Barnes et al., 2007).On the other hand, girls participate more in creative activities (Passmore & French, 2001).Also, girls spend more time in activities that transpire within the framework of home and family, partly because parents have more controlling and restrictive attitudes toward girls, and partly because girls are closer to parents than boys (Philipp, 1998;Cota-Robles & Gamble, 2006).Studies also show that girls spend significantly more time than young men doing the housework and taking care of younger brothers and sisters (Ravanera et al., 2003, Barnes et al., 2007), and therefore participate less in extracurricular activities; these gender differences increase throughout the course of secondary school (Gager, Cooney, & Call, 1999).Bruyn & Cillessenn,(2008) examined the degree to which young people participated in around seventy activities.Factor analysis grouping was applied to the activities.Four factors are highlighted: Factor I deals with social activities (going to the movies, shopping ...); Factor II with creative activities; Factor III with activities dedicated to sports and cars and Factor IV with activities that involve computer use.Girls score higher in Factors I and II, while boys score higher in Factors III and IV.However, if one takes the score from separate factors and ties it to the popularity variable, interesting new findings appear.For instance, girls who are popular in their peer group spend more time doing activities related to sports and cars.On the other hand, less popular girls are more likely to engage in creative activities.With young men a gap also appears between what is typical and what is desirable.So young men who are more inclined towards social activities are more popular, and the ones who spend more time working on the computer are less popular.Such findings imply that young people who overturn sexual stereotypes and prejudices with their behavior have better status in the peer group.

Studies of young people's leisure time
Typically, different variations of scales are used in studies of leisure time.Usually the respondent is offered a list of common leisure time activities, and the respondent's task is to evaluate in a certain way those activities in which they recently participated (Cotterell, 1990).Some studies use structured interviews which pose questions that are similar to the ones found in questionnaires.using this technique, Barnes et al. (2007) showed in a recent study that young people from the United States, between 15 and 18 years old, spend the majority of their leisure time watching TV, an average of 20 hours a week.their time is also occupied by extracurricular activities and hobbies (11 hours per week) and homework (8 hours per week).
Aside from registering the frequency of the activities chosen from the offered list, there were efforts to group in some way the various activities that respondents engaged in.Using cluster analysis, Bartko and Eccles (Bartko & Eccles, 2003), based on the degree of participation in certain activities, divided respondents into groups oriented towards: sport and friendship, school, volunteer work and earning money.the largest number of respondents belonged to the group that was focused on school.
Scales provide valuable data, without a doubt.However, if this is the only methodological approach to examining leisure time, there can be some systematic oversights.One of them is aforementioned possibility of examiners not offering less active activities in the lists they prepared (Hendry et al., 2005).Secondly, the use of scales demands a certain level of ability and honesty from examinees so that they could assess the amount of time spent in particular activities.Thirdly, researchers who emphasize creating specific intervention programs for young people criticized the studies which used scales because they did not provide insight into the particular context in which an activity takes place, information necessary to understand the full meaning of the activities (Cotterell, 1990).As an alternative, they suggested a precise tracking of the places and times during which certain activities take place by creating a map that follows patterns of movement.This method allows links to be traced between an individual youth and their local environment in the contexts of both space and time.Still, while such analyses on one hand provide a greater number of relevant data when compared to rating scales, and on the other hand it is hard to generalize when comparing somewhat different surroundings.
It is interesting that the existing research into leisure time has not done a more thorough analysis of the difference between workdays and weekends.We deem it necessary to stress this difference since these are different types of day, so the same activity can have different significance in these varied contexts.For example, a weekend spent studying implies schoolwork overload much more than if a workday was spent in that way.

RESEARCH TOPIC
The focus of this study is to investigate the differences in structure of leisure time between male and female Serbian secondary school students.Structure implies categories of chosen activities our respondents engaged in during their leisure time.
In the introductory part, we presented the results of previous studies on the ways in which boys and girls spend their leisure time.All studies indicate that significant gender differences exist.We expect some of these differences to be present among the sample of Serbian youth as well, particularly those that are school-or sport-oriented.We will compare ours results with the differences in studies from abroad.
The first question we will address is which of the available leisure time activities are the most attractive to our sample of secondary school students.
The second question will relate to the study of differences between Serbian male and female secondary school students' ways of spending their leisure time.We will compare our results with the existing results in literature.

Method
Instrument: The instrument which we used in this study was a questionnaire.It differs in structure from the scale commonly used in studies of leisure time where the subjects are expected to determine how often they engage in common leisure time activities from among a list chosen by researchers.
Recalling the previous day and the previous Saturday, the respondents reported how many hours were spent doing certain activities.Respondents were instructed to describe the activities as accurately as possible, i.e. to specify their content, especially for activities such as watching TV, reading and using the computer.However many different things they did in the same hour interval, respondents kept track of how long each of the activities lasted.
There are several reasons why we decided to use this kind of instrument: -Respondents described the activities themselves, so as to avoid oversight; and, to separate researchers' and young people's conceptions of what leisure time is.This kind of assessment is less demanding for the subjects than assessments required by classical scaling.. -Also, we consider this to be a more objective evaluation than the assessments of what is "rare" and what is "often" or "very often".-The assessment is more precise than when we offered a classical scale because in this way we obtain the exact length of time spent on a particular activity -We obtain data about differences between Saturday and workday activities, and we can interpret the results taking that context into consideration.-In addition to information about the duration of specific activities, other data has been obtained which serves to better understand the nature of the activities and their functions.
The respondents were tasked with describing the previous weekday and previous Saturday, from the moment they got up to the moment they fell asleep.We think it is important to obtain data about Saturday as well as about a weekday because that is the way to get a complete idea about leisure time.In order to describe the day as accurately as possible, a table was prepared in which the respondents accounted for every hour of the day; which activities they were involved in, with whom else the activities were done; and where they were at the time.For the reader to gain a better insight into the layout of the questionnaire, Appendix I contains one row from a table with sample responses.

Sample:
The study included around 922 secondary school students from the 1 st to 4 th grade (385 male secondary school students and 537 female secondary school students), from nine Serbian cities and towns: Novi Sad, Zrenjanin, Odžaci, Belgrade, Kragujevac, Vrnjačka Banja, Niš, Leskovac and Knjaževac.The surveyed students come from a variety of different types of schools: high school, four-year and three-year vocational schools.
Variables:The variables in this study are made up of the individual activities that respondents engaged in during their leisure time.Based on content analysis of respondents' answers from the pilot study, the activities that the respondents reported over those two days are separated and categorized.The analysis we intend to do will only refer to things that are relevant in describing leisure time (activities like being in school, nighttime sleeping, and eating are not taken into consideration).A list of activities used in the statistical analysis of differences between the sexes is given in Appendix II.
The value of each variable is expressed by the time the respondent spent occupied with it.

Results
Tables 1 and 2 show the most common activities of youth from the sample.For each of these activities information is given about: 1) the average time that students from the sample spend doing it, 2) the ranges of the listed time intervals and 3) percentage of students who reported a concrete activity.As expected, the list of activities on a weekday and a Saturday differ significantly.
The differences in the way of spending Saturdays and workdays imply that it is sensible to pay attention to what day it is when the data on secondary school students' leisure time are interpreted.
The most common and longest single activity during the weekday is time spent in transport (Table 1).A more detailed analysis shows that this is mainly for commuting between school and home.Traveling to and from school can be a very fun and contenting activity, but we do not have more detailed information on what exactly students do while traveling.
Tied in second place, in frequency and duration, are two activities with almost identical parameters -they are studying and watching television (Table 1).Approximately 73% of respondents mentioned these activities when describing their previous week day.When you take only those respondents into consideration, the results show that they spend 2 hours on average watching TV and studying.Compared to Barnes and others (Barnes et al., 2007) our secondary school students spend more time studying, and less time watching television when compared to American secondary school students.
When it comes to social activities -going out and socializing, a little more than a third of the students engaged in this (Table 1).The respondents, who mentioned these activities when describing their weekday, spent an average of 2h going out and 1½h socializing.Socializing takes place mostly in home environments on the weekday.
Only 24% of students napped during the day and that lasted about half an hour on average.Using T Test, we got results which indicated that this type of resting is significantly more present in subjects who went to school before noon (t (882) = 3357, p <.01).
Regarding Saturday, for the majority of respondents, this is the day of the week to go out (Table 2).Upon closer analysis of types of going out, the majority of respondents (51%) reported it as time spent in a discotheque, café, or club and only 10% went to private parties.Connected to going out are activities such as grooming (38 minutes) and commuting (77 minutes).In addition to going out, time is spent watching TV on Saturdays, socializing in homes, doing sports and activities related to the computer (Table 2).
However, Saturday is not a day entirely free of responsibilities.It as a day for studying too, though much less than weekdays (about a third of respondents reported this activity), and a portion of time goes towards doing household chores (Table 2).
To examine how a weekday and Saturday differ, depending on whether we are dealing with male or female students, we used the discriminative analysis separating the function which serves as the criterion for distinguishing between these two groups.From the data related to the weekday, one Discriminant function is statistically significant.We Obtained the following parameters of the isolated features: Bartlett Chi-Square test is ξ ² (27) = 305,849, p <.001, canonical correlation r = 0.535, 76.2% of respondents are correctly classified (82.7% of female interviewees and 67.3% male interviewees).
YOUNG PEOPLES LEISURE TIME: GENDER DIFFERENCES 208 Table 3 gives the values of the correlation coefficients of the Discriminant function and the variables.Table 4 gives the centroid values of the gender variable.Looking at the tables, girls noticeably lean towards activities that are either associated with school or school-like (higher value of variables like studying, extracurricular activities, reading).On the other hand, boys spend more time oriented towards sports.Orientation towards sports on one side, and studying on the other, are two variables that have nearly the largest scores of the discriminative function.
Other differences exist in the ways leisure time is structured.Boys use the computer more than girls.Also, boys go out more often, while girls are more likely to socialize in homes, telephone each other and send SMS messages.Additionally, girls go to the stores more often and listen to music more.Concerning responsibilities which are not school related, girls are more likely to do house work, whereas boys are more likely to do jobs that earn money.From the data collected for Saturday there is also one statistically significant discriminant function.Bartlett Chi-square test is x ² (27) = 458.201,p <.001, and the value of canonical correlation is slightly higher than in the case of the weekday R = 0.630.Based on this, 76.2% of respondents (82.7% of female respondents and 67.3% of male respondents) are classified correctly.Looking at the matrix structure of this function (Table 5) and the centroids (Table 6), it can be noted that the lists and signs of variables are almost identical to those in the weekday data.Only their distribution changed to some extent.Again, the two groups of respondents are best differentiated through activities related to the practice of sports.Apart from that, socializing at each others' homes and grooming was exclusive to girls, while computer use was characteristic of boys.The list of the remaining variables is similar to the weekday data only in that it has a lower participation in the Discriminant function.

DISCUSSION
When looking at how the weekday and Saturday of the respondents appears overall, what attracts attention is not so much the presence but the absence of some activities.Except for sports, no other extracurricular and / or creative activity is represented to a great extent (less that 5% of respondents report it).very few young people are involved in public work, or some form of civic activism (describing their weekday only four respondents mentioned this type of activity, and describing their Saturday, only two).Studies from abroad indicate that such activities are more common in other countries and that they fill a significant part of youth's leisure time (Barnes et al., 2007;Bartko & Eccles, 2003;Bruyn & Cillessenn, 2008).Thus, in American high schools about 70% of students are involved in some kind of extracurricular activity (Feldman & Matjasko, 2005).Unfortunately, our students are deprived of the opportunities that these activities offer.
Results pertaining to the examination of differences between the sexes have confirmed the findings of other studies: girls study more, spend less time playing sports, go out less, use the computer less and engage in housework more.The biggest difference between the two groups of respondents was in their orientation towards sports.Sport is usually the single extracurricular activity available to the majority of young people.Girls, for some reason, participate less in sports than boys (only 12% of girls play sports on Saturday, while 48% of boys do).Note that the difference in the amount of time girls and boys spend doing sports is a result we had anticipated to obtain as we have come across it in numerous foreign (Bruyn & Cillessenn, 2008;Miller et al., 2007;Cho, 2004;Passmore & French, 2001;Barnes et al., 2007) and domestic researches (Ministarstvo omladine i sporta, 2008).
The fact that girls are more school-oriented is in accordance with the existing research that implies a statistically significantly better performance of girls in a number of national testings in the UK, Australia and the USA (Gorard, Rees, & Salisbury, 1999).This trend has also been noticed in the research into educational outcomes in Serbia (Polovina, 2009).According to this data, studying is oddly considered as "feminine activity".
Our results indicate that boys and girls differ in the manner in which they organize socializing.Girls spend more time socializing in their homes or via telephone, while young males go out more.
Differences have emerged in those activities that may indicate differences in the ways of gaining independence.Thus, earning money is more characteristic of boys and taking on household responsibilities is more characteristic of girls.These differences have been obtained in foreign studies (Ravanera, Rajulton, & Turcotte, 2003;Barnes et al., 2007), but have not been further examined among the young in Serbia.Such significant differences in structuring leisure time indicate that secondary school boys and girls actually belong to different worlds (they socialize in different ways, gain independence differently, place different level of importance on school and sports).Intervention programs aimed at the young should take these differences into account so as to be adequate for both genders.
It is interesting that, compared to existing studies, we did not discover differences in participating in creative activities.Interestingly, foreign studies show that such activities are more typical for girls (Passmore & French, 2001;Bruyn & Cillessenn, 2008).Apparently such activities are not more typical for either girls or boys in Serbia.
The results are surprisingly consistent with mainstream gender stereotypes: girls spend more time at home, grooming and going out to shop, while boys are oriented towards the outside world, sports, technology and earning money.We did not expect for the gender divide to be so stereotypical already at this age.Specifically, we were surprised by the agreement between our results and those of all other studies, presented in the theoretical introduction, in which there is an established connection between sex and participation in certain leisure time activities.These results may indicate that a large number of young people have submitted to cultural pressure, which is probably very strong.
The goal of this study was not to examine the correlation of the resulting differences between the sexes.However, it seems important to begin the search for variables which would either level or enhance the obtained differences between the sexes.The next necessary step is to analyze whether the gathered picture is homogeneous or if it varies depending on some independent variables (type of school, age, parents' education, location of the school).
Recall that Bruyn & Cillessenn(2008) found that the popularity variable significantly changed the perspective on the obtained differences.In addition to popularity, it would be interesting to determine whether there are peer groups in which these differences are more acute, as well as those where they are atypical.Research that would go in this direction would contribute to progress in the way of understanding these differences.

Table 1 :
Time spent in activities during the weekday

Table 3 :
Extract of the matrix of the structure of the discriminant function: weekday

Table 5 :
Extract of the matrix of the structure of the discriminant function: Saturday

Table 6 :
Value of centroids on the discriminative function: Saturday