Household Expenditure on Leisure: a Comparative Study of Italian Households with Children from Y- and Z-Generation

Abstract

The intrinsic complexity of post-materialist society makes it challenging to investigate the connection between social changes and generations. However, the study of consumption might help in the analysis of such a connection. In this paper, we analyse empirical data of consumption on leisure of Italian households, and focus on families at a very precise stage of family life-cycle, that is, couples with teenager children. We look at consumption of households at different points in time, 2001, 2007, and 2012, in order to investigate the impact of both social change and generation of children–Y-generation in 2001 and 2007, and Z-generation in 2012–on the leisure expenditure patterns of families. Specifically, we consider secondary data of yearly expenditure on a wide range of different leisure activities, and use hierarchical clustering and logistic regression to highlight specificities in family consumption patterns on leisure, depending on both the generation of offspring and the inter-time between sampled cohorts, 2001–2012 and 2007–2012. Our analysis indicates the presence of differences between the consumption patterns on leisure of families with Y-generation children and families with Z-generation children. However, our results also point out that such differences cannot be explained by solely invoking the different generation of offspring, and that social changes should also be taken into account.