Social status differentiation of leisure activities variation over the weekend – Approaching the voraciousness thesis by a sequence complexity measure

Abstract

Sullivan and Katz-Gerro (2007) as well as Katz-Gerr o and Sullivan (2010) argues that engaging in a var iety of leisure activities with high frequency is a distinc t feature of omnivorous cultural consumption. And l ike omnivorousness it bears a status-distinctive characteris tic. The authors reported, that high status social categories show a more voracious leisure time-use pattern, i.e. eng age in a greater number of activities with higher f requency over the period of one week. In this paper we are e xamining the voraciousness thesis by utilizing a ne wly proposed measure of activities variety, namely the seq uence complexity index, which is developed by Gabadinho et al., 2011. Using data from German Time Use Survey (2000/2001) we focus on cultural leisure activities reported for the weekend. Our results show that complexity a s a measure of time-related variety captures signif icant social differentiation of leisure activities over the weekend. But our complexity-based findings do not support that, that voraciousness understood as high levels of tim e used for varied leisure activities is also signif icant at weekend. Beyond that the results support the assumption , that there is social structural framing of a Satu rday, where gender, age and marital statues effects on leisure variation come into effect. JEL-Codes: D13, D19, J17, Z1, Z13