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Introduction : culture et mode de vie

Johanne Charbonneau and Madeleine Gauthier

Introduction: Culture and Lifestyle

Johanne Charbonneau and Madeleine Gauthier

Leisure, Culture and Lifestyle

Anthony. J. Veal
AbstractThis paper examines the place of the concept of lifestyle in leisure studies in the light of three recent publications. In Leisure and Contemporary Society Ken Roberts (1999) concludes that lifestyle is not a key concept for leisure studies because it has not replaced factors such as age, gender and social class in providing individuals with a sense of identity. In Leisure and Culture, Chris Rojek (2000) reviews the distinctive features of the dominant theoretical paradigms of leisure studies/leisure sociology over the last thirty years, and suggests that, while cultural studies has had a major influence on leisure studies, in practice it has been preoccupied with class. He therefore suggests that a renewed focus on culture could provide a way forward for leisure studies/leisure sociology. Steven Miles (2000), in Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, argues that the concept of subculture, traditionally used in studies of youth, has been compromised by its association with the structural, neo-Marxist paradigms of the cultural studies tradition of the 1980s and 1990s, and that therefore the term lifestyle is a more suitable concept for studying the lives of young people today. In the light of these and other recent contributions to leisure theory, the paper therefore argues that the concept of lifestyle remains a useful concept which can make a significant contribution to the development of leisure studies.

Young Adolescents’ Leisure Patterns

Elke Zeijl, Manuela du Bois-Reymond and Yolanda te Poel
AbstractUntil recently, studies into juveniles’ leisure activities concentrated mainly on adolescents. In this study, the leisure activities of both pre-adolescents and adolescents are studied. Departing from sociological debates on the busyness of contemporary young adolescents’ leisure diaries and of an advanced onset of the transition from childhood into the youth phase, a questionnaire was designed for 10 to 15 year-olds. 927 Dutch youngsters were studied. By means of CATPCA, it was found that 10-12 year-old girls mainly engage in reading and in creative activities, whereas the boys spend most time playing outside. Fourteen and fifteen year-olds, on the other hand, showed a clear interest in youth-cultural activities, which did not support theoretical notions about the advancement of adolescence at the expense of childhood. Questions on organized activities showed that the market of leisure opportunities is not equally accessible to everyone: higher class kids are in an advantageous position compared to lower class kids, which affects the degree to which these subgroups have the opportunity to develop important leisure capital through informal learning.

Activités du temps libre et sociabilité de jeunes à la sortie de l’adolescence

Daniel Lavenu
AbstractThis study is based on a longitudinal panel survey regarding the social integration of young people after exiting the French school system. One of the basic targets of this study is the correlation of young people’s relational network and the forms of sociability they adopt in post-adolescence and during the transitional period leading to adulthood. In this paper, we shall be looking more specifically at the structures and development, between the first two waves of the survey, of the activities pursued by young people within their relational network. We will show that each successive break with the past (leaving high school, setting up as a couple, getting a job, etc.) translates into a reduction in the volume of group leisure activities and a re-orientation towards individual or personal activities. We will also show that this reorganization is not independent of the relational network or of the framework in which they function.

Les modes de vie et les pratiques culturelles des jeunes : homogénéisation de la culture et individualisation des pratiques ?

Madeleine Gauthier, Claire Boily and Luce Duval
AbstractChanges in life styles have coincided with an increase in the amount of time that young people devote to cultural practices. Does an increase in the number of years of schooling have something to do with the interest shown by young adults for reading, using libraries and bookshops, visiting art galleries and museums – these latter attracting more of this age group than of any other? Do these various phenomena indicate a certain homogenization of different age cohorts when it comes to so-called ’traditional’ cultural activities? Concomitantly, does the decrease in the attraction exercised by certain activities, more especially, those that are subject to constraining schedules, indicate that these young adults are personalizing their behaviour, according to some observers, to the point of individualism. On the one hand, young people’s enthusiasm for group activities does not seem to have changed. What has changed is their attitude to the time constraints associated with certain activities affecting their loyalty to certain TV shows, to purchasing season tickets for the theatre, etc. And this would suggest a lateral movement of sociability towards other forms of expression rather than a regression in sociability as such.

Aging and Cohort Changes in Sports and Physical Training from the Golden Decades Onward: A Cohort Study in Switzerland

Christian J. Lalive d’Epinay, Carole Maystre and Jean-François Bickel
AbstractFor most analysts, the Golden Decades (roughly 1950-1980) mark a period of far-reaching change – both structural and cultural – in Western societies. In an attempt to link the macro, societal transformation with individual behavior, the authors elaborate the “context-and-cohort-change” paradigm (as opposed to the “age-related-decline” paradigm), according to which they scrutinize the participation in sports and physical training at two stages (mid-life, third age) of adult life of the members of two cohorts (C1, born 1905-1914, N = 1012; C2, born 1920-1929, N = 661).The results show (a) a robust intercohort increase in the rate of exercisers from C1 to C2; (b) no significant longitudinal decline in participation from mid-life to third age, either in C1 or in C2, but a high rate of turnover among exercisers, with “late exercisers” filling the gaps left by the “dropouts”; (c) changes in the sociodemographic composition of exercisers, reflecting a move away from the pattern in which sports and physical exercise were mostly a male, urban, and upper-class activity, to another, much more generalized and democratic pattern.

Youth, Leisure and Home: Space, Place and Identity

Joan Abbott-Chapman and Margaret Robertson
AbstractThis qualitative and quantitative research investigates the leisure activities of 265 young adolescents in Tasmania, Australia, in relation to their social constructs of home and neighbourhood as private and public spaces, and in the practical contexts of their day to day lives. As these young people search for meaning and identity in a fast changing world dominated by economic and technological globalisation, the symbolic materials available to them both socially and spatially are examined using innovative research methods which involve visual as well as verbal triggers. Findings show that their chosen activities, while reflecting global trends in the use of information and communication technology, focus mainly on friendship network building in the immediate locale and take place predominantly in home and neighbourhood. Favourite places for leisure pursuits also emphasise the importance and idealisation of the ’traditional’ home and of the natural environment in the search for private places in which to withdraw and reflect. Findings also suggest that the adolescents seek private spaces for safe seclusion or group activities with close friends as part of the process of construction of self as a reflexive and symbolic project. The inherently ’conservative’ and highly gendered responses of the sample are discussed in the context of current sociocultural theories linking space, place and identity.

Les jardins communautaires de Montréal : un espace social ambigu

Nathalie Bouvier-Daclon and Gilles Sénécal
AbstractThe City of Montreal Community Gardens program provides Montrealers with the opportunity to cultivate a small vegetable plot. The program is also designed to offer a space for leisure and socializing. However, being at once public, institutional, social and individual, the community garden may be seen as a socially ambiguous space. The objective of the present paper is to reach an understanding of the social dimensions attached to community gardens,. To do this we needed to analyse the social interaction and relationships between the gardener-users in order to understand what types of sociability were promoted by these spaces. The social image of the community garden that resulted from this analysis suggests that it is a space of limited socializing, where relationships develop in hugger-mugger fashion, are mainly concerned with gardening practices, and are limited to individuals or small groups. The only community element of these gardens is their name.

Cultural Diversity and Leisure: Experiences of Women in Australia

Tracy Taylor
AbstractThere is a growing body of literature that seeks to better understand the relationships between leisure and cultural diversity. This study explored the leisure experiences of women from culturally diverse backgrounds in the multicultural country of Australia. The research draws comparisons with a similar study in Canada (Tirone and Pedlar, 2000) and comments on the similarities between the two countries in terms of immigration policies and their subsequent impact on the leisure experiences of migrants. It was found that many parallels can be drawn but that there are also apparent differences in the ways which migrants experience leisure. The ultimate conclusion of both studies is the same, leisure participation falls on a continuum and while it can facilitate the valuing diversity, it can also be an alienating experience. Multiethnic countries need to be aware of how attitudes, systems and programs facilitate such outcomes and strive to be more culturally inclusive.

Le jeu pathologique dans la communauté chinoise, une vision anthropologique

Elisabeth Papineau
AbstractPathological gambling has been identified as a major issue in the Montreal Chinese community. From different sources, we can confirm the mismatch between prevention and treatment services for cultural minorities in an increasingly multicultural world. With an anthropological approach, the identification of cultural factors typical of the Chinese community could permit greater efficiency in identification, prevention and treatment of pathological gambling. The following article will present the occidental theoretical vision of pathological gambling, followed by the Chinese perception of the same phenomenon. The notions of fatality, destiny and chance in Chinese thinking will be presented as constituting risk factors for excessive gambling, and a brief look at a few Montreal Chinese community social norms will contribute to assessing the differences inherent to Chinese experience of pathological gambling.

Temps parental et formes familiales

Benoît Rapoport and Céline Le Bourdais
AbstractTo date, research on the use of time, a rare resource, has been essentially focused on the use of time by individuals and on the sharing of activities amongst the members of a same household. The 1998 Canadian General Social Survey on Time Use allows us to take our understanding of family organization somewhat further, not only because it describes the schedules of the various members of a household, but because it also measures the time spent in carrying out shared activities. In the present article, we take advantage of the fact that the survey systematically noted the presence of children of the household when they were in the room with the respondent in order to describe parent-child interaction. On the one hand, we look at the variations in parental time as it relates to different characteristics of the respondents; on the other, we show, through a multivariate analysis, that parental time is much the same, whether we are dealing with a conventional or with a blended family.