Aspects of Leisure on Adolescent’s Well-Being in Two Countries

Abstract

Leisure is among the perspectives of the scientific investigation on well-being in adolescence. This study verifies the relationships among motivation, organization and satisfaction with the activities of leisure and well-being in adolescents of Spain and Brazil. Participants were adolescents aged from 12 to 16 from the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, Spain (n = 1,280) and from the Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil (n = 1,588). From the total sample (n = 2,868), 59.8 % are girls. Data collection was made through questionnaires administration in public and private schools and followed all ethics procedure of each country. Personal well-being was accessed using the Personal Well-being Index (PWI) and leisure aspects were accessed using different measures concerning the preferences, the motivation and the structure of adolescents’ leisure. Preliminary analysis verified the adequacy of the instruments’ factor structures (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis). After that, it was proposed a model with the relations of the variables using Structural Equation Modeling technique, and a final model achieved good fit indexes (χ2(190) = 715.2, CFI = .965, RMSEA (CI) = .03 [.02–.03]). In this model, the aspects that are related to adolescents’ well-being are: intrinsic motivation, satisfaction with ludic activities and those related to interpersonal relationship and also the leisure structure. Multigroup analysis showed that the model fits well for both countries (χ2(409) = 1052.9, CFI = .957, RMSEA (CI) = .02 [.02–.03]). These findings point to the importance of interventions that take into account these aspects of adolescents’ leisure, considering its influence on their well-being.