Changing Issues in Leisure-Family Research—Again

Abstract

I. The Period of Neglect-the 60s and 70s Very briefly, the family received little attention in this early developing period of leisure research. Surveys, often of occupational groups and using demographic independent variables made population aggregates the common unit of analysis. The accepted wisdom was that leisure was best explained from its relation to work. Late in the period, however, there was the beginning of a return to the household-based research of the community study tradition that placed leisure in a fuller context. II. The Affirming Period of Consensus-the early SOs With the incursion of attributional psychological models, the usual unit of analysis became the individual. Previously ignored but evident facts became accepted: most leisure is at home and with other household members. Attention to the meanings as well as locales and forms of activity had to include elements of expressing and developing relationships. The leisure-family connection in time became almost taken-for-granted, a new consensus. The premise was primarily positive; leisure and family are good for each other. Functional approaches led to attention to bonding in leisure, affection and intimacy as a form of leisure, developmental play, and the contribution of leisure to family solidarity. There were even a few suggestions of a dialectic between the presumed expressive freedom of classic leisure and the reality of role-based expectations and requirements, with most of the examples given being female. Yet, the focus was still on the nuclear family with the premise that playing together was a good thing. Family was the focal example of meanings and satisfactions of leisure for the individual, as yet undifferentiated by gender or class. A few cracks in the consensus did appear, however, with suggestions that women's family roles mixed relatively intrinsically satisfying activity with role obligations. III. The Critical Period-the late 80s and 90s Of course, the periods overlap here. Nevertheless, some signs of significant change emerged. The first was giving serious attention to gender. Less dramatically, the unit of analysis has more and more come to be the individual in a defined context. There was a new consensus that family leisure was more than developmental freedom and bonding; it was also, as I said using Marcuse's expression in the 1982 paper, a domain of surplus repression. It may be useful to subdivide the analysis into three issues: 1. Fuller attention was given to family variations and disruptions, even in the early SOs. Divorce, the interlocked impacts of poverty and ethnicity, and varied sexual orientations made the preoccupation with the traditional nuclear family untenable. We had to take the unpredictable zigzag life course seriously. 2. Notice began to be given to the lived conditions of life in real and varied contexts. Real life consists of sequential and cumulative disruptions, traumas, tragedies, and projects of putting things back together. Leisure and family are thoroughly contextual, social as well as individual. Research could no longer assume that the middle mass consisted mostly of straight, white, middle-income families. 3. Focus, then, began to be given to differentiating factors. The first and foremost was, of course, to look at and listen to women. The leisure of adult women could no longer be encompassed in neat categories of activity and meaning, of lists and scales. Rather, there is a dialectic of meaning and constraint shaped by ideologies more than slightly patriarchal in origin and repressive in intent. The central fact of change is the involvement of most women in the paid labor force with consequent role conflicts. The stalled revolution is more than a time allocation crunch; it highlights fundamental cultural/political value systems. …