Leisure Activities are Associated with Self-Efficacy in Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

Leisure activities during childhood and adolescence play important roles in individual development. They may also contribute to self-efficacy (SE), which is a key psychological construct of Bandura’s social cognitive theory. Here we test to what extent SE is related leisure engagement by using data from a large-scale representative cross-sectional survey of German children, adolescents, and younger adults (N = 7,158). As predicted, sports, book reading, music, and SE were positively, but computer gaming was negatively correlated, even after controlling for a range of covariates. These findings confirm and extend previous work to suggest that engagement in popular leisure activities, except computer gaming, are positively associated with the development of individual self-efficacy during the first decades of life.