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Temporal and Spatial Constraints to Daily out-of-Home Leisure in Urban China: a GPS-Based Time Diary Survey
Abstract
Temporal and spatial constraints are prevalent, structural barriers to daily leisure participation. This study explored different forms of temporal and spatial constraints that urban residents experience in China when they participate in daily leisure activities. A one-week time diary survey was conducted, coupled with GPS tracking. Data consisted of 3297 leisure activities nested within 333 residents in a suburban area of Beijing (i.e., Shangdi-Qinghe), China. Two-level (i.e., individual- and activity-level) logistic regression analyses were performed for weekdays and weekends separately. Our results demonstrate that the distribution, rather than an absolute amount, of free time influenced out-of-home leisure participation. Respondents’ weekend time was fragmented by spatiotemporal inflexible maintenance activities, thus lowering the possibility of out-of-home leisure engagement. Having previously participated in activity outside of the home increased the likelihood of out-of-home leisure involvement.
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Leisure is the means of reproducing our energies we lose due to objective and subjective weariness. While the ‘cure’ for objective fatigue is sleeping and resting, the solution for subjective tiredness is leisure and pleasure. We need both to stay healthy. Opportunities to stay healthy are however not equal in our societies: Place of Residence; Race/Ethnicity; Occupation; Gender; Religion; Education; Socio-economic status; and Social capital/Resources (all together referred to as PROGRESS) are the key determinants. In the present paper we highlight at the gender issue from among the key determinants, which status is in strong connection with almost all the above listed features. Throughout history women’s political power, financial status (feminisation of poverty, wage gaps), education and labour market status (vertical and horizontal segregation) were less favourable than men’s. There are stereotypes like women cannot reconcile work and family. Women, who do all or most of the housework spare a lot of expenses for the family, without financial or moral appreciation. The gender-specific analysis of Hungarian time budget surveys performed since 1993 underline several aspects of unequal opportunities of men and women. Women spend more time on socially constrained workload than men, thanks to their unilateral responsibilities in household tasks and child rearing. As 24 h make a day up, regardless of genders, this excess time should be taken away from an other set of activities, namely from leisure. Mothers with small children, women on a maternity leave, housewives and the actively working women have the smallest amount of leisure time. Women with a vocational education and those living in lower status settlements also possess less time for leisure. Analysis by age revealed, that 30–39 and 40–49-year-old women have the least leisure time. The paper also highlights at the health - mental health consequences women suffer from due to the lack of quality leisure time, and suggests the utilisation of an effective time management aided by lifestyle counsellor professionals.
Recent years have witnessed a steady growth of time-use research, driven by the increased research and policy interest in population activity patterns and their associations with long-term outcomes. There is recent interest in moving beyond traditional paper- administered time diaries to use new technologies for data collection in order to reduce respondent burden and administration costs, and to improve data quality. This paper presents two novel diary instruments that were employed by a large-scale multi-disci- plinary cohort study in order to obtain information on the time allocation of adolescents in the United Kingdom. A web-administered diary and a smartphone app were created, and a mixed-mode data collection approach was followed: cohort members were asked to choose between these two modes, and those who were unable or refused to use the web/app modes were offered a paper diary. Using data from a pilot survey of 86 participants, we examine diary data quality indicators across the three modes. Results suggest that the web and app modes yield an overall better time diary data quality than the paper mode, with a higher proportion of diaries with complete activity and contextual information. Results also show that the web and app modes yield a comparable number of activity episodes to the paper mode. These results suggest that the use of new technologies can improve diary data quality. Future research using larger samples should systematically investigate selection and measurement effects in mixed-mode time-use survey designs.
This article assesses the status of hierarchical leisure constraints theory (Crawford & Godbey, 1987; Crawford, Jackson, & Godbey, 1991) regarding many issues. Such issues include clarification and elaboration of some aspects of the original model, a review of studies which have used or examined the model and the extent to which they are confirmatory, critiques of the original model by various authors, and avenues for further research. Conclusions drawn include that the model is cross culturally relevant, that the model may examine forms of behavior other than leisure, and that, while research to date has been largely confirmatory, there is a high potential for the theory to be expanded in order to advance leisure constraints research to the next level.
This paper examines national-level leisure time availability and participation patterns among urban residents of China. The findings show that Mainland Chinese enjoy relatively little leisure time and that strong contrasts exist in regional distribution of free time availability. People of all ages, genders, and incomes show a general preference for passive/media and other home-based activities while displaying low participation rates in exercise. Regional comparisons show that residents of the Northeast are busiest and engage most frequently in home-based activities while people in the West have more leisure time and engage in social activities most frequently. Differences in leisure time availability and leisure participation based on gender, age and income are also explored.
Lists of leisure activities and/or constraints used in research in non-Western settings are typically imported from studies executed in North America or Europe despite the possible influence of cultural context. To avoid this problem, we asked 182 informants from six cities in Taiwan to free list leisure constraints. While our primary purpose was to develop a culture-appropriate list of constraints for use in future research, we also illustrate how free lists can be analyzed in terms of item salience and the frequency with which groups that varied in terms of gender and age listed particular items. Results indicated that older informants listed constraints related to age and health more frequently than younger informants while younger informants were more concerned with resources, such as money. This study takes culture into account in research on leisure constraints by using an approach based on informant-provided items rather than standardized lists taken from other contexts and imposed by researchers.
This study examined the effects of micro (i.e., motivation, constraint) and macro (i.e., urbanization) factors on Chinese people's leisure-time physical activity (LTPA). Participants representing high (n = 170) and low (n = 146) urbanization levels completed an on-site questionnaire. T-tests indicated that fitness/health was the most important motivation, followed by enjoyment and perseverance; structural constraint was the most important barrier, followed by interpersonal constraint. Structural equation modeling also indicated that: (a) urbanization positively affected LTPA participation and constraints to LTPA; (b) motivation positively, and constraint negatively, influenced LTPA; and (c) motivation and constraint were not related. These findings suggest that examining macro factors such as urbanization could improve our understanding of LTPA, as well as the micro factors that affect it.
Unlike prospective participants with desire for initial participation, current participants are likely to have different interest in habitual leisure engagement from participation itself. Accordingly, they may respond to the effects of leisure constraints differently in order to progress toward a higher level of leisure involvement. This study aims to construct a theoretical framework that demonstrates how diverse components of current participants’ constraints negotiation process are conceptually connected to each other. Study results suggest that different negotiation strategies help current participants adjust their willingness to participate in the activity more frequently. Results also denote that the three dimensions of leisure constraints are differently associated with cognitive negotiation strategies, and commitment plays an important role in promoting the use of negotiation strategies to mitigate current participants’ perception of leisure constraints.
The stress suppressing model proposes that sufficient resources reduce stress. The stress exposure model suggests that certain factors expose individuals to more stress. The current study tested these two models by assessing the within-person lagging effect of leisure time on perceived severity of daily stressors. Analyzing eight-day diary data (N=2,022), we found that having more leisure time than usual on a day reduced perceived severity of daily stressors the next day and that the decrease in severity became larger with further increase in leisure time. Additionally, the effect is much stronger among busy individuals who usually had little leisure time. The findings demonstrated an accelerated suppressing effect that differed between-person, and the lagging effect affords stronger implication for causality than correlational analysis.
The purpose of this study was to enhance the conceptual understanding of the importance and meaning of constraints to leisure for women with physical disabilities. In-depth qualitative interviews with women with disabilities were used to obtain information about the experience and meanings of leisure. Symbolic interactionism provided the framework for conducting the study. Two major themes emerged relative to constraints to leisure: magnification of leisure constraints for women with physical disabilities, and strategies for negotiating constraints. The data suggested that leisure choices were not necessarily disability-determined, but the context of the disability influenced choices and constraints. Means for negotiating leisure constraints were explicated by examining the lives of women with physical disabilities.
This study explored children's participation in recreational (physical) activities and the extent to which this participation was influenced by individual and household socio-demographics and characteristics of the social and physical environment. Travel and activity diaries were used to collect data on out-of-home recreational activities for a random sample of 4,293 children in primary schools in the Netherlands. These data were investigated in relation to measures describing the social and physical living environment. Specifically, a Bayesian belief network was proposed because it derives and represents simultaneously all direct and indirect relationships between the selected variables. Results indicated that participation in various types of recreational activities was directly related to the socio-economic status of the household, the perceived safety of the neighborhood, the size of agricultural area in the neighborhood, travel distance, and day of the week. Planners and designers are recommended to find a good land use mix, and specifically make sure that they focus their attention on safety issues, as these factors stimulate children's participation in recreational physical activities.
This study extends previous research on leisure constraints by developing a new,
theory-based, inventory of intrapersonal leisure constraints items using the theory of planned behavior and self-determination theory as guiding frameworks, and then using the inventory to assess the cross-cultural validity of the hierarchical model of leisure constraints (Crawford, Jackson, & Godbey, 1991). These objectives are accomplished by comparing how perceptions of 10 intrapersonal constraints items and perceptions of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural constraints affect starting a new leisure activity among university students in Canada and in Mainland China. English- and simplified Chinese-language questionnaires yielded useable data from 227 Canadian and 216 Mainland Chinese participants. Nine of 10 intrapersonal constraints items differed significantly, with Chinese students being more intrapersonally constrained than Canadians in all but one instance. A single combined measure of intrapersonal constraints was compared with similar indices for interpersonal and structural constraints. All three constraints categories differed significantly: Chinese students were more intra- and interpersonally constrained, while Canadian students were more structurally constrained. Despite these cultural differences, support for the hierarchical leisure constraints model was found in the data for both Chinese and Canadian students, indicating the general applicability of this framework across two cultures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The behavior of time allocation to two types of discretionary activities is formulated as a doubly-censored Tobit model. The model is capable of incorporating cases where the entire amount of time available for discretionary activity is allocated to one type of activity and the other type of activity is not engaged at all. The model is applied to examine individuals'' allocation of time to in-home and out-of-home discretionary activities on working days and non-working days, using a weekly time-use data set from the Netherlands. Workers'' daily activity patterns vary significantly between working days and non-working days, while it can be expected that patterns of time allocation are correlated between working days and non-working days. A set of error components is introduced into the model to represent this correlation, adopting a mass point approach which requires no assumption about the distribution of the error components. The validity of the model is examined statistically.
Although most existing studies support that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can relax traditional space–time constraints in relation to activities, direct empirical studies that measure the level and influenced extent of such constraints are insufficient. Additionally, the variation and interrelations between spatial and temporal dimensions of fixity constraints are rarely taken into account. This study uses self-reported flexibility from activity diary data to capture two key dimensions of space–time constraints: (1) how the Internet became embedded differently in various types of activities and (2) the interaction relationships between Internet use, temporal flexibility, and spatial flexibility. From 709 respondents in Beijing in 2012, 7-day GPS-facilitated activity diaries were collected and used to assess perceived space–time flexibility and Internet use for each activity. A structural equations model was applied to investigate how Internet use influences the temporal and spatial flexibility of activities, after controlling for individuals’ socio-economic attributes, activity features, and spatial factors. The findings suggest that Internet use increases the temporal flexibility of simultaneous activities, as well as the spatial fixity of activities. This supports that ICT use could lead to new constraints due to the need to maintain connectivity, thus making some activities more fixed in space.
Previous research has suggested the existence of both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in time allocation modelling. Surprisingly few empirical studies have addressed this issue in leisure research. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to identify and describe the time use patterns of people at weekends. The sample consisted of 2118 individuals/diaries from the Time Use Survey collected by the Spanish National Statistics Institute from 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2010. The results obtained reveal the existence of nine clusters (people who pursue domestic activities, sleepyheads and couch potatoes, weekend workers, book and radio/music lovers during leisure time, DIY handy-people, art lovers with quite a lot of leisure time, people committed to caring for relatives, eclectics, and people who mix leisure time and studies). These groups are different, not only as regards their propensity to engage in each activity and the average time allocated to this (what), but also as regards their socio-demographic profiles (who) and the activity rhythms (when). This study may have implications for policy-makers and leisure businesses in Spain at a time when there is considerable amount of debate regarding the need to rationalise schedules and standardise them with those of other European Union countries.
Significant public attention has been given to the perceived lack of youth time spent outside. Diverse approaches make it difficult to develop consensus around youth time-use patterns and guide efforts to get kids outside. The purpose of this study was to compare results of a 7-day time diary used to document adolescent outdoor time with results from other time-use methodologies. Seventh graders (N=43) were selected to complete week-long time-use diaries and recall surveys. Time diary estimates were compared to an online survey, a simulated two-day time diary, and a simulated experience sampling. Results suggested that differences existed between time outside recorded in time diaries and recall survey. Using two days of diary data or experience sampling was more comparable.
This study reviewed non-Western and cross-cultural/national research published in five major leisure studies journals between 1990 and 2009. Of 1,891 total articles, 4.1% were non-Western and cross-cultural/national in nature. Overall: (a) Greater China was the most frequently studied culture/nation (24.4%); (b) survey research was the most often employed method (33.8%); (c) (b) perceived benefits, motivations, and leisure meanings was the most common theme (14.1%); and (d) although articles on this topic increased fivefold over 20 years, over 90% of recent leisure articles still focused, in whole or in part, on only slightly more than 10% of the world's population. Culture/nation, methodological, and thematic differences across the five journals are described and implications for leisure theory and practice are outlined.
The purpose of this article is to address some of the issues raised by Samdahl and Jekubovich (1997) in their critique of leisure constraints research. I suggest that the authors have based their criticism on a rather narrow and outdated conception of leisure constraints, that the concept of constraints is not an artificial construct, and that the new data and interpretations put forward by Samdahl and Jekubovich are better viewed as potentially important refinements to thinking about constraints to leisure rather than as grounds for abandoning constraints research.
This paper was prompted by the publication in Britain in 2009 of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which attracted considerable comment, both positive and negative and both substantive and methodological. The book claimed to show that, on a range of health and social measures of well-being, rich countries with more equal income distributions tended to perform better than those with less equal income distributions. Leisure time and behaviour were not among the indicators of well-being included and, while some researchers have sought to fill this gap, the range of leisure indicators used to date has been limited. This paper examines the relationship between income inequality and leisure time on a world-wide basis, and ten measures of cultural participation and two of sport and physical recreation participation in European countries. Efforts are made to address some of the methodological criticisms which have been made of The Spirit Level. It is found that more equal countries have more leisure time and higher levels of participation in cultural and sporting activities, and that there are also significant relationships with absolute Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head and with religious-related values. The extent to which variations in leisure time and participation are related to income inequality is linked to Thorstein Veblen’s theory of pecuniary emulation, referred to as the ‘Veblen effect’.
Although heterogeneity exists, Western countries can generally be characterised by a more individualistic orientation, whereas China is a more collectivist-oriented society that is undergoing a transformation. This empirical study examined socio-cultural differences between cities in China and the Netherlands in terms of companionship and urban meeting places on the basis of activity diary surveys conducted in the metropolitan areas of Beijing and Utrecht. The focus was on activity decision-making in daily life, especially on the meaning of ‘feeling at home’. Companionship and relevant meeting places were controlled for socio-demographics, analysed and compared in both metropolitan areas. The results show that in Beijing, the majority of activities are undertaken with members of the nuclear and extended family, and the home (‘haven’) is a place for intimate contacts with family members. In Utrecht, the share of individual activities and activities undertaken with friends is much higher than in Beijing, and the home (‘heaven’) is open for contacts with self-selected friends. The modelling results indicate that socio-cultural differences work through various socio-demographic variables, such as gender, family structure and educational level, providing some insights for policymakers.
Time-use diary data convey information about the activities an individual was engaged in, when and for how long, and the order of these activities throughout the day. The data are usually analyzed by summarizing the time used per activity category. The aggregates are then used to determine the mean time use of a mean individual on an average day. However, this approach discards information about the duration of activities, the order in which they are undertaken, and the time of day each activity is carried out. This paper outlines an alternative approach grounded in the time-geographic theoretical framework, which takes the duration, order, and timing of activities into consideration and thus yields new knowledge. The two approaches to analyzing diary data are compared using a simple empirical example of gender differences in time use for paid work. The focus is on the effects of methodological differences rather than on the empirical outcomes. The argument is made that using an approach that takes the sequence of activities into account deepens our understanding of how people organize their daily activities in the context of a whole day at an aggregate level.
The purpose of this study is to describe leisure constraints as perceived by residents of the Chinese cities Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Chengdu, and Shenzhen. Rather than relying on lists of leisure constraints developed in other contexts, we used the common ethnographic technique of free listing, which allows informants to indicate what they perceive as constraints on their leisure. A second sample of informants rated the importance of 37 constraints determined through the free listing procedure. Constraints in these cities can be categorized, based on their perceived importance, into eight distinct types. These relate to several demographic and sociographic variables.
One of the ongoing problems surrounding the whole area of leisure studies concerns conceptualization of the term leisure itself. Few empirical studies to date have looked at the meaning of leisure, and even fewer have incorporated a grounded theory approach.Using a symbolic interactionist framework, the present study employed a time‐diary technique combined with in‐depth interviews to explore perceptions of leisure situations among a random sample of married couples. The results showed that although leisure could be experienced during almost any type of activity, there was considerable consensus with regard to the perceptual factors associated with leisure situations. The factors shown to best differentiate leisure from non‐leisure were enjoyment, freedom of choice, relaxation, intrinsic motivation, and the lack of evaluation. None of these factors alone can be equated with the concept of leisure, but the combination of three or more factors leads to accurate predictions of the definition of situations as leisure.
Home is often conceived as a refuge for busy working parents, but new findings indicate that relatively little leisure takes place there. We describe the indoor home leisure activities of middle‐class, dual‐earner parents, using ethnographic data from 32 Los Angeles‐area families of many ethnicities and real income levels. In our analysis, we rely most heavily on systematic scan sampling data in which the locations and activities of each family member were documented by hand‐held computer every 10 minutes. Only about 15% of parents’ time at home appears to be dedicated to leisure activities. Of that leisure time, nearly all is experienced indoors, much of it in passive and often non‐interactive contexts like watching television. Both mothers and fathers often experience indoor free time in very short, fragmented episodes, although fathers are more likely to have some longer periods of leisure. There are also gender inequalities in how often, when during the day, and where in the house parents spend their leisure time, although these inequalities are more pronounced in some families than others.
This study examines the determinants of daily participation and time-use in nature-based outdoor recreation among the Finnish population, comparing frequently used modeling methods. Using an original time diary dataset, results show that daily participation decision is mainly influenced by age, dog ownership, potential unemployment and timing of the day (weekend vs. weekday, summer vs. autumn), whereas the main determinants for the daily time-use are age, timing of the day, gender and province. Results indicate that a simple two-part model (probit and OLS) is an appropriate approach for modeling the daily decision process concerning nature-based recreation behavior.
The Chinese government conducted its first time use survey of the activities of Chinese individuals in 2008. Activities were
classified into three broad types, maintenance activities, subsistence activities and leisure activities. Time use patterns
were defined by an individuals’ time spent on maintenance, subsistence and leisure activities each day. We analyzed the time
use patterns of different population segments, such as gender, region, age, employment status, and income. Rural residents
spend 2 h per day more on SA than urban residents. Five of the employment status categories; migrant workers, full-time students,
retirees, the unemployed, and Home-makers, each have unique time schedules. Moreover, time use patterns vary greatly between
the different age groups and different income levels. The relationships between the time spent on maintenance, subsistence,
and leisure activities were analyzed. Time spent on subsistence activities each day were negatively correlated with time spent
on maintenance and leisure activities. The time spent on maintenance activities was positively correlated with the time spent
on leisure activities. The ratio of time spent on maintenance, subsistence and leisure activities in China is compared with
that in Japan, America and New Zealand. A new term, Time Structure, was coined to describe the ratio of individual time spent
on maintenance, subsistence and leisure activities. The time structure in China is 60:24:16 and differs from the structures
found in the other countries examined.
This paper is a review and assessment of the contributions made by activity-based approaches to the understanding and forecasting of travel behavior. In their brief history of approximately a decade, activity-based analyses have received extensive interest. This work has led to an accumulation of empirical evidence and new insights and has made substantial contributions toward the better understanding of travel behavior. However, practical applications of the approach in transportation planning and policy development have been scarce. Based on an analysis of the inherent characteristics of the activity-based approach, a review of recent (after the 1981 Oxford conference) developments, and a synthesis of the findings from past empirical studies, this study attempts to evaluate the contribution made by activity-based analyses and determine the reasons for the limited practical application. Recommendations are made for the future development of activity-based analysis as a science of travel behavior and as a tool in the practice of transportation planning and policy development.
This paper formulates a model for the allocation of total weekly discretionary time of individuals between in-home and out- of-home locations and between weekdays and the weekend. The model formulation takes the form of a continuous utility-maximizing resource allocation problem. The formulation is applied to an empirical analysis using data drawn from a 1985 time-use survey conducted in the Netherlands. This survey gathered time-use information from individuals over a period of one week and also collected detailed household-personal socio-demographic data. The empirical analysis uses household socio-demographics, individual socio-demographics, and work-related characteristics as the explanatory variables. Among the explanatory variables, age of the individual and work duration during the weekdays appear to be the most important determinants of discretionary time allocation.
This paper examines the location choice associated with discretionary activities (in-home vs. out-of-home). These substitution
patterns are important in terms of travel demand as in-home activities do not necessitate travel while out-of-home activities
incur travel. Mixed logit models are estimated using an activity dataset (2003 CHASE data) to analyze the factors associated
with this choice at the individual activity-level. Results suggest that the attributes of an activity significantly contribute
to understanding the likelihood of engaging in out-of-home activities. Activity type interaction terms reveal the varying
influence that socio-demographics, activity attributes and travel have over four different activity types modeled. The results
reveal that the location choice (in-home vs. out-of-home) is sensitive to travel characteristics. As the travel time and cost
increases, an individual is less likely to engage in an activity out-of-home. Compared to passive and social activities, the
location of active activities is more sensitive to changes in travel attributes.
KeywordsActivity location choice-In-home activities-Out-of-home activities-Mixed logit-Activity attributes
This paper presents a model for the type of recreational activity episodes that individuals pursue during the weekend. The choice set characterizing the type of recreational episode includes in-home, out-of-home, and pure recreational episodes (pure recreation refers to recreation trips pursued for the sole purpose of the recreational value obtained from the trip, such as walking, bicycling, and joy driving). The paper estimates a mixed multinomial logit formulation using the 2000 San Francisco Bay Area Travel Survey. The effects of household and individual sociodemographics, land-use and density variables, and episode participation attributes are examined. Inter-individual and intra-individual variation in unobserved determinants of episode type choice are also analyzed. Finally, the implications of the results for land-use and transportation planning are identified.
Time as a constraint to leisure
- G Godbey
Multilevel models with dichotomous outcomes
- R H Heck
- S L Thomas
- L N Tabata
Travel adjustments and life styles: A behavioral approach
- S Reichman
Spatial and temporal constraints to natural resource recreation and tourism: A GIS perspective
- M A Tarrant
- R P Porter
A social psychology of leisure
- G J Walker
- D A Kleiber
- R C Mannell